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LIFE AT ITS BEST 



Life at Its Best 



A SERIES OF STUDIES IN THE VITAL 
DOCTRINES OF CONSCIOUS- 
NESS, IDEAL, AND 
EFFORT 



By HORACE M. DU BOSE 

Editor Epworth Era 



One touch, and what a strange 
Glory might burst on us ! 
What a hid universe! 
Do we sport carelessly, 
Blindly upon the verge 
Of an Apocalypse? 

— Israel Zangwill 



Nashville, Tenn.; Dallas, Tex. 

Publishing House of the M. E. Church, South 

Smith & Lamar, Agents 

1908 






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Copyright, 1908 

BY 

Smith & Lamar 



PREFACE, 

These studies — although imperfect enough both as to plan 
and realization — are a song of degrees, a scheme of practical, 
conscious living. They have been life, either in some measure 
of experience or else in yearnings and ideals concerning 
which the soul that pledges them writes still its prophecy of 
hope. There is but one true life, and all its departments and 
interests are consecrated into a unity and all may be de- 
scribed in common terms. At its best, life is a sacrament, a 
revelation. It is dread with meaning, mysterious in the im- 
measurable consciousness and passions which inform it, and 
joyful through constant contact with the soul of infinity and 
the beauty of the universe. It begins with the least of all 
things and ends with the highest. 

The favorite theory of these studies is that we must first 
find and make our lives before we can use them altruistically 
or to the glory of our Creator, and that happiness is the re- 
sult of this use, as music is of the use of the viol or the harp. 
I give them to the youth of my country in the hope that they 
may prove useful as an incitant to self-knowledge and an 
inspiration to soulful effort. H. M. Du Bose. 

April 7, 1908. 



THE VOYAGE. 

BY H. M. D. 

Haste now and gird thyself, O soul, 
The harbor answers to the breeze. 

And on the surf the great ships roll, 
Obeisant to the outer seas. 

One stands apart within the bay, 
Laden witn treasure, heap on heap, 

To sail beyond the common day ; 
We will in it go down the deep. 

Perhaps a favoring star our course 
To fertile Phthia at last may lead, 

And bring us happy intercourse 

With some great race divorced from greed. 

Our life shall there enlarge with use 
And there our days of earth be long, 

Soft mantled in celestial dews, 
And cheered by airs of deathless song. 

I have been weary long to eat 
The bread of custom and of chance, 

xAnd weary long to hear men treat 
Of place and sordid circumstance. 

From these, O soul, we may be free ! 

The west with sapphire flame is whorled; 
Let us make choice of hope and ?ea 

And sail the circuit of the world. 

Blow, winds of summer ; rolling HiymeL 
From out the crowding topsails, blow ! 

Blow downward through the gates of fire; 

Blow eastward by the flaming west; 
My life consumes with its desire 

To tread the shorelands of the blest ! 



CONTENTS. 

Chapter I. Page 

The Approach 13 

Chapter II. 
How Shall I Choose? 21 

Chapter III. 
The Meaning of Personality 31 

Chapter IV. 
The Intellectual Self 41 

Chapter V. 
The Cure of the Soul 51 

Chapter VI. 
The Gospel of the Body 61 

Chapter VII. 
How Shall I Be Taught?.. 71 

Chapter VIII. 
The Use of Books 81 

Chapter IX. 
The Ministry of Art 93 

Chapter X. 
Close to Nature 105 

Chapter XL 
.The Altruistic Light.. 115 

Chapter XII. 
Citizenship and 1 Patriotism 125 

Chapter XIII. 
Liberty and Law 135 

Chapter XIV. 
Eternity in the Heart 145 



THE APPROACH. 



In the still air the music lies unheard; 

In the rough marble beauty hides unseen : 
To make the music and the beauty needs 

The master's touch, the sculptor's chisel keen. 

Great Master, touch us with thy skillful hand; 

Let not the music that is in us die ! 
Great Sculptor, hew and polish us ; nor let, 

Hidden and lost, thy form within us lie ! 

— Hor a tins Bonar. 




CHAPTER I. 
THE APPROACH. 

HERE is rapture in the consciousness of being 
alive. It is the river of water proceeding from 
the throne. In the perennial flow of empowered 
consciousness life comes to its own. When the 
living man loses the secret of momentarily hold- 
ing himself, of looking himself through, then he has lost all. 
When he recovers this secret, he has recovered all. Here the 
first and also the ultimate emphasis of our study is to be 
placed. It is the door of approach and possession. 

What we shall seek to describe in these studies is not the 
unattainable, but the attainable — that which, in its degree, is 
within the reach of all. This attainment describes the point 
at which each life so masters itself and its surroundings as 
to converge its powers upon the highest motives and ideals 
possible to it. In such a state consciousness is full. The man 
is alive. Normality obtains throughout. Thought is active, 
but not strained ; the sympathies are ardent, but not hysterical ; 
the affections spring like a fountain, and purpose glows like 
a star. The body harmonizes with these inward states and 
becomes a vassal to honor. The perfect life emerges — that is, 
the perfect life in process. The absolute is out of sight; 
even the earthly ideal may be remote. The excellence reached 
is that of its stage. 

I purposely do not speak of happiness in this connection as 
a goal or an end. Happiness is a duty no less than a privilege. 
It is a fruit of the healthy life. The waters of that throne- 
born river are sweet by nature. Music is the use of the 
instrument. Happiness is not something brought to life, but 
something brought out of it. It is the manner of true living. 

Our life is that mystery which involves all others. We 
came from far; we journey far — from deep to deep. Happy 
is that one haled onward by conscious destiny, to whom 



i4 LIFE AT ITS BEST. 

the mystery behind and the mystery before are not more 
momentous than the consciousness of that which lies between. 
It is only when life burns with a fire in its bones that it 
gives either outward or inward light. It must consume with 
the quenchless mystery of itself to become an inward force 
and meet the demands upon it from without. 

With each soul it is at first an unreasoned concession that 
anything existed before itself. At last it is a settled but un- 
expounded belief that itself existed primarily, and has been 
partaker since the beginning. This notion must be the ex- 
pression of a natural affinity; it must be God-implanted. 
There can nowhere be found a stronger subjective argument 
for the divinity of life. It is not a pleasing hope nor a fond 
desire alone, but an imperative of consciousness. When the 
life awakes from the dreams of ignorance, custom, and time 
to the realization of the perfect human sense, then this in- 
stinct of the divine asserts itself. 

A study like this can have little to' do with scientific terms, 
yet it is worth the while here to recall that, after all their 
hesitations and skeptical misgivings, the very chiefest of the 
scientists have allowed that what is essentially the life of 
man was one with the first of the vital forces, the reason 
and the cause of the beginning. At the root of the tree and 
at the top is man, without whom the growth and fructifica- 
tion of the ages are meaningless. 

Thus it stands with the general miracle of life. But our 
approach must bring us into the citadel. It is the individual 
that expounds life and realizes its possibilities. All history 
is aggregated biography. Life in the end must have counted 
to itself so many pulse beats as there shall have been pas- 
sionate, deathless souls of men. We stand singly before our 
Maker, and always at the opening of eternity, embodying 
each in himself some dread, though imperfect, measure of the 
whole. Each life is meetly made in this, for it stands to its 
Author as the brush, the colors, and the canvas do to the 
painter and as the instrument does to the musician. 

No life comes of chance. Prescience has somewhere girded 
each soul, and love has somewhere pronounced upon each a 
name. The creature may embarrass, but can never surprise, 



THE APPROACH. 1.5 

the Creator; neither can he be thrust into the Creator's plans 
unawares. The Bethlehem birth expounds every other. Be- 
fore the newborn babe all precedents depart, all prejudices 
become silent. Life is supreme, and is never so potent as in 
the nakedness of infancy. The babe is the true microcosm. 
Born in sin (it may be of sin as a paternity), it is yet not a 
partaker of guilt. It embodies the hope of the empowered 
consciousness. The mystery of the deep whence it came is 
upon it. The world obeisantly makes room for a new soul, 
an incarnation of the inscrutable. It is an epiphany forever, 
and loses its highest meaning only through perpetual repeti- 
tion. 

If this incarnation of what is less than Godhood could 
occur but once, the hosts of the stars might well move from 
their paths to stand over it and the archons might well come 
with gifts and wonderings to the place of its cradling. There 
is but one sane view to be taken of human life, and that is 
that it is a direct gift from God. If science in any form 
should seem to contradict this view, then the less of science. 
The business of science is mainly with the tangible and sen- 
suous. It offers no certain help beyond the realms in which 
these lie. But the largest concern of our lives is with the 
sublimal, the spiritual. These are to be experienced' and not 
generalized. When it is agreed that the higher miracle of 
life may be expounded in the terms of a material philosophy, 
there will be little courage left to attempt the things that 
transcend. Life is divine both at its bottom and at its top. 
There is no other way rightly to get at the mystery of the 
human soul. As the soul is the offspring of the body and its 
ethereal, divine counterpart, there is argued a coming fuller 
doctrine of the body. The Saturn rings of the divine encircle 
our twofold life. This is that thing the discovery and use of 
which make possible in life the highest and best. 

The one inalienable possession of life is itself. All else 
is accident. Life we cannot lose, however many privative 
terms we invent to describe its transitions from states of 
plenty to states of indigence. The doctrine of essential im- 
mortality never has been a technical one; it should never be 
permitted to become such. To disprove it would be bootless, 



16 LIFE AT ITS BEST. 

and to accept its contrary would be to give up what is neces- 
sary as the basis of personal faith. 

It is evident that this personal human life is the center of 
moral responsibility. "The perfect law of liberty" fits into 
the self-resolving will. The divine Fatherhood rests in an 
offspring possessed of such a will. In the contemplation of it 
the divine pleasure is full. Life's end is to glorify God. Duty 
is strongest, most eloquent not when its challenge comes 
through penal statutes, but when traduced from consciousness. 
To live into the revelation is better than to be anathematized 
into it. The Decalogue is persistent and nonrevocable, but 
the Beatitudes present an ultimate contrast of liberty and at- 
tainment. It is the difference between Law and Life. The 
Galilean secret was not that of obedience only, but of some- 
thing above and beyond it in the perfect consciousness of the 
Son of Man wmich made obedience natural, joyful. "In him 
was life; and the life was the light of men." It is the light 
of this Galilean consciousness that, shining in the secret place 
of the soul, reveals to it the beauty and the perfection of 
obedience. This is no more than to say that this light reveals 
the life to itself and makes its best possible in a way that 
grace and truth have adapted to each life in its own place. 
It was in this illumination that the prodigal came to himself. 

It is not alone responsibility that finds its pivot in the il- 
luminated life, but authority as well is centered there. It is 
not lawful to speak of it in terms of the material ; but the 
living center of the universe is a human heart. That heart is 
in the bosom of the ascended Son of Man, not less human be- 
cause of his exaltation; shall it not be said more perfectly, 
more absolutely human in that nature which the divine in the 
incarnation molded to itself? This is where the mystery of 
our life becomes cumulative, but it is where it takes the 
scepter. The disciple life is likewise a center of authority. 
Even faith does not dare as yet to expound the promise of the 
Master concerning thrones and seats. It is an authority which 
subsists in our kinship with the Life. To share the con- 
sciousness of Jesus is to see and hold our life for all its uses. 
It is this doctrine of the consciousness that makes impossible 
any pretext, ethical rote, or creed of life that does not spring 



THE APPROACH. 17 

vitally out of experience. The king man is the one whose 
consciousness of power and authority in the life stands him 
instead of a scepter. The man who lives is the man who can. 

The Galilean Life not only realized what is the essential 
need of all lives, but it became forever the apocalypse of the 
perfected Soul. The ministry which manifested it converged 
on the individual. The Twelve were separately called. St. 
Paul not only illustrated the power of the cross, but he be- 
came in a most important sense its opportunity. This came 
about not through the accidents of birth or education, but in 
spite of them. It was because he was Paul, an individuation 
of powers made possible in the death of Saul. There were 
other apostles, but one was a supremely chosen vessel. This 
is the Galilean line, the line of human life empowered in 
consciousness. In this line each one who will takes his rank. 

The religion of the Jews made a Jew ; the religion of the 
Greeks made a Greek; but the religion of Jesus made a 
Man. Examine this as you will, and the truth will always 
appear — namely, that that in us which is most spiritual, most 
like the d'ivine is the thing we desire to think of as most 
truly humanlike when our humanity is taken at its best. That 
it is that is in reach of the life that has found itself. In 
a word, it is the channel of divine grace when it works in us. 

In the beautiful Arthurian legend of the Siege Perilous, 
so effectively done by the great Laureate, this doctrine of a 
life engulfed in consciousness of itself is allegorically ex- 
pounded. The Siege Perilous was the forbidden seat in Ar- 
thur's palace of which it was famed that if a man sat therein 
he should henceforth lose himself in phantasies and inef- 
fective dreams. But one at length desperately threw himself 
into the Siege Perilous, saying : "If I lose myself, I find my- 
self.'' His reward was to hear thunders, see the holy grail, 
and find himself clothed upon with spiritual power. But the 
rise of a soul is not always dynamical. It may come through 
the treading of a long and lonely way; but coming at last, 
its goal is self-knowledge and self-mastery, desperately ac- 
quired. So much indeed often becomes necessary that the life 
may find itself in the treading down of self-love and self- 
interest. 
2 



1 8 LIFE AT ITS BEST. 

The best service to be rendered the young is that which will 
awaken enthusiasm and the inspiration of motive and point 
out an ideal. Here is the crux of teaching. The com- 
plexities of life are never more persistent than when its 
highest interests are being considered. It is possible, how- 
ever, to reduce these to a simple treatment. But whatever this 
treatment, it must look to one first great end, awakening. 
The youth must be made to know, to feel, that he lives. All 
things then become possible. Could we have a literature, 
not coldly scientific, on the feelings, could we then have a 
chair in every college and university to teach it and. make it 
effective, we should save our generations from the perils of 
artificiality and rationalism. 

To chasten one's inner thoughts, to industriously improve 
one's mental powers, to cultivate a pure and expressive 
speech, to preserve the body in health, to be both frugal and 
generous, to foster the most genuine sympathies, and to 
crown all with the love of God is the true play of life when 
at its best. From what is almost the newest book under my 
hand I quote the following definitions : 

"Good is that which promotes development, and is in har- 
mony with the will of God. It is akin to health and beauty 
and happiness." 

"Evil is that which retards or frustrates development and 
injures some part of the universe. It is -akin to disease and 
ugliness and misery."* 

This is the modern answer to an ancient question. If made 
a measure by the yearning life, it cannot fail to "teach and 
premonish ;" but to become completely effective it must take 
fire from a consciousness moved from its depths upward. 
Except to the soul studiously, purposely alive, the doctrine 
of that which "injures some part of the universe" is a profit- 
less riddle. The mastery of self is at last but servitude under 
the higher mastery of restraints and choice. 

"Our wills are ours we know not how, 
Our wills are ours to make them thine." 

* " Substance of Faith," Sir Oliver Lodge. 



HOW SHALL I CHOOSE? ■ 



O World, thou choosest not the better part ! 
It is not wisdom to be only wise, 
And on the inward vision close the eyes, 

But it is wisdom to believe the heart. 

Bid, then, the tender light to shine 

By which alone the mortal heart is led 
Unto the thinking of the thought divine. 

— George S ant ay ana. 




CHAPTER II. 

HOW SHALL I CHOOSE? 

O life is responsible for the fact of itself. The 
clay has no power over the potter. The creature 
has no veto upon the Creator. Man is the child 
of God and of his mother, Nature. His life is 
chosen for him, and is preserved for a time by 
a ministry of which he is ignorant. But, awaking out of un- 
consciousness, he makes choice of what he is and becomes 
destiny to himself. 

There is ample knowledge of life, but not wisdom to use 
it. We know the what, but not the how. The doctrine of the 
simple life has commanded much study in our time, nor 
scarcely less has the regimen of "the efficient life," while the 
notion of "the strenuous life" has been all but erected into a 
national ideal. In some sense all these are parts of the whole ; 
but no healthy or complete life can be realized on the ex- 
clusive plane of any. There is a fuller doctrine. It is 
that of the empowered life. It comprehends the others as 
they may become available in their stages. It is the standard 
of the highest and best of choice. 

It is in the first stage of consciousness that life elects to 
live. Thenceforward it is no longer a thing thrust upon it- 
self, but it thrusts itself out into the universe to choose and 
find its way. It is thus that each life comes to share respon- 
sibility with the Infinite. At its beginning life is made by 
nature of whatsoever substance it will. When its time ar- 
rives, life stands upon its feet and makes choice of another 
substance which shortly overmatches that which it had from 
nature. 

It is thus that every soul has passed upon life and appropri 
ated it for better or for worse. It is thus that moral respon- 
sibility begins. The indentures of destiny and grace are re- 
written. The pledge of nature is returned, and heaven is re- 



LIFE AT ITS BEST. 

leased from bond. Here it is that man meets the command- 
ment, as he met it in the garden long ago. The ever-recurring 
first and supreme opportunity of choice is renewed. 

Let it be understood that the universal passive acceptance 
of life as a conscious physical fact is not the choice which 
brings the empowered life. It opens the way, and may lead 
on to that empowerment. It may degenerate into a mere 
senuous, or even animal, consciousness in which selfishness 
and lawlessness have their home. Life is a tragedy until the 
ultimate choice is made. The details of that choice describe 
the hunger of desire, the pursuit after truth, an unselfish 
ministry to others, and the soulful use of God's blessings. 
This is life's perfect dedication. 

The great question is not so much "What shall I choose to 
bring my life to its best?" as "How shall I choose the su- 
preme fact of life itself?" Out of that choice, fully realized, 
the best flows as a fountain from its source. Again, it is 
not so much "What good thing shall I do to inherit eternal 
life?" as "How shall I find eternal life whose fruit is the 
constant ripening of good?" The Great Teacher made this 
plain. If there should arise an intellectual difficulty in think- 
ing on a salvation obtained in the last hour, as in the case of 
the dying thief, its answer is here. Life is not in the doing, 
but in the being. When consciousness burns and the will 
chooses, the soul lives. With it, then, a single day is as a 
thousand years. It lives. 

The love of life and self has been planted deeply in us, 
and the choice of self-good and self-happiness placed heavily 
upon us for the highest reasons of altruism. Only as the 
individual man perfects his bodily and intellectual self does 
he become an effective unit in the larger life — a "lively stone" 
in the temple of the higher praise. Only as we have perfect 
men can we have a perfect humanity. 

"May my life 
Express the image of a better time, 
More wise desires and simpler manners ; nurse 
My heart in genuine freedom; all pure thoughts 
Ee with me." 



HOW SHALL I CHOOSE? 23 

There is but one life. It is our loss that we have separated, 
in thought, our struggling life of labor and care from that 
which we call the higher. The true sanctification unifies life. 
The gospel begins with the material problems of humanity. 
It was the Son of the Carpenter who wrought out the world's 
perfect creed. The Christian consciousness is the normal con- 
sciousness, the product which nature and grace are conspiring 
to exhibit. The Church of God is at last the expression of 
that consciousness in a life lived in the world. The Church 
is assuredly this, and not a riddle of ordinances and dog- 
mas. 

The growth of life, like the palm tree, is from within. Ac- 
tion is the aspect of the hidden soul. Every life is explained 
in a subjective fact; every soul is moved by a distinct in- 
spiration. It is self-knowledge that counts as being worthy 
the effort put forth to achieve it; that has mastered the 
doctrine of results; that understands that out of the fire 
comes no more gold than was in the ores given it, that life 
returns only what is put into it. 

It is important to choose for reading in youth those books 
whose effects are inspirational. There is, in fact, a natural 
turning to books of this character. It is the law which gives 
to story and biography their perpetual charm. The hero of 
the one and the subject of the other carry through the narra- 
tive a current of emotions and an active consciousness which 
give sequence and life to the whole. It is often said that 
sympathy accounts for this popularity of romance and biog- 
raphy, especially of the former — that is, that it is the emo- 
tional appeal that becomes effective. That is a reason, no 
doubt, but not the main one, which is that the reader is made 
to see a life in the romance. It is what he must see and make 
perfect in himself. It is not an answer to this theory to say 
that interest in the hero of the romance does not depend al- 
ways upon his ethical qualities. Every reader can explain 
his own likes and dislikes. 

This is, I think, the place to speak of something, often de- 
cried, which appears to me to have a preeminent claim on 
these studies. It is enthusiasm. The choice whose reasons 



24 LIFE AT ITS BEST. 

and scope we are discussing cannot by any possibility avoid 
contact with this so much misused word. Enthusiasm means 
properly the divine impulse in us. If we have learned any- 
thing, it is that the divine Spirit both helps and instructs the 
faithful man. In every way, then, enthusiasm is to be counted 
to the life as an asset of highest value. Without it no great 
work ever has been or ever can be done. To undertake to 
compass our tasks with strenuous excitement is not neces- 
sarily to work with enthusiasm. Enthusiasm is calm, cour- 
ageous. It is the eyes that see behind and before. 

This last is true; nevertheless, the best of life's work must 
be done under pressure. The voice which keeps life awake 
to itself is a perpetual call. The busy man is the one who 
will have time to perform an additional kindly and unselfish 
office. The one who carries a great public charge — a Church, 
a college, a hospital — with ofttimes its debts upon his shoul- 
ders, is the one who is called upon to do a public extra when 
the man of leisure, though not seldom more capable, is passed 
by. The truth is that one never understands what can be 
done until he finds himself alive to its need and alive to his 
own willingness to try. 

"Virtue thus 
Sets forth and magnifies herself; thus feeds 
A calm, a beautiful and silent fire 
From the encumbrances of mortal life." 

There is another uncatalogued thing which is nearly related 
to this study of life's conscious possession of itself. Genius 
is that gift with which nature is believed to specially endow 
certain of her sons; but the heredity of genius is a much-ex- 
aggerated conceit. Here again the power of choice contra- 
dicts an ancient fallacy. The most unfavorable beginnings 
have ended in the triumphs of genius. Carlyle's dictum 
comes more and more to be relied upon: "Genius is the in- 
finite art of taking pains." Consciously moved emotions open 
the avenues of inspiration ; wisely cultivated talents widen the 
cranial cavities ; while healthy exercise develops and pre- 
serves the body. These are the grounds of genius. The fruit 



HOW SHALL I CHOOSE? 25 

which springs out of them when cultivated is a natural one. 
The man who moves forward with his emotions, powers, and 
equipments wrought into a unity is a genius. He fulfills the 
ideal ; he has a spirit, the life spirit. 

I cannot but feel that I should make a statement of caution 
at this point. The life consciousness which I have been 
preaching should never be identified at any time with self- 
consciousness, nor with any self-centered habits of thought. 
They are as distinct as are the bitter pools by the shore and 
the great free waves that ebb and flow from the main. Those 
who must always hold in view the thought that they are mak- 
ing character and destiny are much like those who are making 
reputation. Delusion follows both. Virtue, when it springs 
from character, is spontaneous. Duties are discharged and 
opinions avouched out of the love of what they expound. 
Such action proclaims the death of selfishness. 

It has passed for a saying that genius is self-conscious, and 
that great thinkers and great authors are egotists. This is 
far from being true. Many of the world's greatest men have 
been simple-hearted, and as natural in life, manner, and 
habit as children. Socrates and Sir Isaac Newton amongst 
the philosophers were men of simple habits and unostentatious 
manners. Mr. Gladstone illustrated the simple life, and was 
distinguished for his unaffected bearing and courtesy. Al- 
fred Tennyson left behind him the memory of a public and 
private bearing as simple as it was impressive. He was, in 
fact, remarkably gifted with the grace of humility. His let- 
ters disclose his dissatisfaction with himself and his achieve- 
ments. He pitched his ideals high; he was consciously alive 
to his work; but he knew when he failed to grasp what he 
reached after. An anecdote contributed by the Duke of Ar- 
gyle and quoted by Miss Carey in her volume on Tennyson 
exhibits the poet's humility. "The first words I heard him 
utter," says the Duke, "remain indelibly impressed on my 
memory. On being introduced to him at an evening party in 
the house of Lord John Russell, I said with perhaps some 
emotion: 'I am so glad to know you P Not in the tone or 
voice of a mere conventional reply, but in the accents of sin- 



26 LIFE AT ITS BEST. 

cere humility, he answered : 'You won't find much in me — 
after all/" 

These men — types of their race in the ages — lived in the 
possession of a tremendously stimulated consciousness. The 
universe rolled about them, and they saw it, felt it, mingled 
with it. But they lost themselves in the boundlessness of the 
life which they discovered. Self-consciousness was impos- 
sible to them. 

Life's greatness, as also its perils, is in its freedom of choice. 
Here is the place at which the soul may eat honey or drink 
vinegar mingled with gall. How shall I choose? To refer 
the task of choice to the intellect exclusively is to return a 
diet of Dead Sea apples. The life is more than intellect; it 
is soul also. From this soul in action comes a tremendous, 
rejoicing thing called feeling, as from the intellect in action 
comes the miracle of thought. Thought and feeling must 
blend in every choice. To set the man in us who thinks 
against the one that feels is to follow a wandering fire; while, 
on the other hand, to set the one that feels against the one 
that thinks is to give rein to a fanatical conceit. Both prayer 
and judgment should inspire our choices. 

Let it not be supposed for a moment that this putting of 
choice and thought under the perpetual umpirage of the emo- 
tional self is to put the life out of the line of practical things. 
It is not; it is a certain cure of artificiality. The only 
quality of judgment which surpasses common sense is un- 
common sense. The sway of uncommon sense is native to 
the simple life — that is, the life restored to itself and em- 
powered in consciousness to work itself out in use and at- 
tainment. 

"All generous feelings flourish and rejoice; 
Forbearance, charity in deed and thought, 
And resolution competent to take 
Out of the bosom of simplicity 
All that her holy customs recommend." 

Nor can I close the present lecture without reemphasizing 
the truth that the realized choices and ideals of each life 



HOW SHALL I CHOOSE? 27 

are measured by its resources and opportunities. The best 
of life is its best. There was put upon my table years ago 
a slender volume of poems entitled "The Songs of a Life- 
time." "A lifetime!" The phrase was almost pathetic. 
The songs were modest and dealt with homely themes; but 
they were the results of multiplied millions of emotional ebbs 
and flows. They found few readers, did these "songs," and, 
in the nature of the case, could last but a day; but it 
is something to have made a song that could last even 
for a day, though a lifetime were spent in the making 
The author had motives and a high purpose; he felt, he saw. 
If he failed to make others feel and see, he did not lose his 
reward. He brought his life to its best and gave it a voice 
Who has done more? He did what he could — he broke an 
alabaster box on the feet of the Master of Melodies, and it 
was accounted "very precious" because it was bought with 
the passion-price of his lifetime. A gray-haired old man 
tottering down the last reach of the way, holding in his hand 
a nosegay of wood flowers gathered during the days of his 
uneventful life, is the picture I see. They tell still — the wood 
flowers — of summer and sunshine and love; they bring mem- 
ories of dark ways and glooms and thorns. But they were 
life's best, made a gift at the last. The songs are not im- 
mortal, but the soul that uttered them is. It had been the 
same if the songs had not been uttered aloud. The soul can 
hear its own voice. Its fullest songs are always without words 
Whether in the workshop, at the forge, in the counting- 
room — in high places or low — life is the one thing to be 
chosen and used as a capital investment. Brought to its best, 
however lowly that best, it abundantly justifies the choice. 



THE MEANING OF PERSONALITY. 



Applause 
To that blest son of foresight ; lord of fate ! 
That awful independent on to-morrow 
Whose work is done ; who triumphs in the past ; 
Whose yesterdays look backward with a smile. 

Night Thoughts. 

And hence one master passion in the breast, 
Like Aaron's serpent, swallows up the rest. 

— Pope. 




CHAPTER III. 

THE MEANING OF PERSONALITY. 

N the earlier of these lectures I am seeking to 
bring into view those things in life a knowledge 
of which will help us to truly live. After having 
emphasized the necessity of self-realization as 
the condition of a full and healthy life, it seems 
proper and logical to inquire into the meaning of personality. 
In getting hold of life through a normalized consciousness it 
is personality which acts and is acted upon. 

The personality of each life is that unity of itself that can 
neither be diminished nor communicated. It is akin to im- 
mortality; but immortality describes a state, while personality 
describes the largest activity of life. Personality is the thing 
we become when our consciousness meets the world, the uni- 
verse. 

Personality is the ripe fruit of living. The individual man 
is not only the unit of society, but society is only the individual 
man enlarged. The social body is consciously tempered by 
each separate life that composes it. Each man weighs in 
the mass of humanity, and that weight is registered some- 
where on the graduated scale of life. The meaning of per- 
sonality must be apparent in this. The importance of devel- 
oping and perfecting one's personality should be equally ap- 
parent. Here it is, in fact, that judgment begins. If I am 
capable of making myself into a fixed force for good or evil, 
and if that fixed force is to go into society and with other 
like forces affect the destinies of the present and the future, 
I must somewhere account for my choices. This account 
must be not to myself only, who am conscious and can judge 
to the point of penalty ; but it must go to yet other and equally 
competent tribunals, where consciousness is also active and 
where there is power to adjudge penalty. A. creature must 



$2 LIFE AT ITS BEST. 

live before it can act. This is true of man in a double sense. 
He must live both naturally and ethically before he can be 
man in the true sense. It is the personality of which we speak 
that makes the true man. Without that the creature is but 
an animal with instincts that have broken down on the way 
to intellect., and a consciousness so stagnant that one part of 
it does not act upon the other. The life depends upon the 
man, 

" 'Tis God gives skill, 
But not without men's hands : He could not make 
Antonio Stradivari's violins without Antonio." 

Personality is largely affected by the earliest choices of life 
and by those influences which it consents to obey in youth. 
The child at first knows itself as a third person, and its speech 
accords with that confusion of consciousness; but at last it 
proclaims itself as "I," and personality takes up the scepter 
of rule. Then ensues a season of supreme opportunity — the 
opportunity of personality, of life as a miraculous force, an 
individuated glory. It was this miracle, supremely illustrated, 
which filled with momentary wonder the workshop at Naz- 
areth. 

How much each one's personality is hereditary — that is, 
how much of it is inherited from his forbears — it is not im- 
portant here to inquire. It is only important to understand 
to what extent each one has power over himself to compel 
an answer from the life within and to shape to it the manner 
of his outer self. 

This is by no means the same thing as forming habits or 
even making character. It is personality that determines 
both habit and character. Until personality perfectly asserts 
itself, the effort to make headway through habit or the sway 
of character will fail. The perfect discovery of personality 
is the touchstone of life. It is a thing "builded far from ac- 
cident." 

An old philosopher divided the blessings of life into three 
parts — namely, those that come to us from without, those of 
the soul, and those of the body. It is difficult to separate 



THE MEANING OF PERSONALITY. 33 

between the soul and the body in a multitude of life's bless- 
ings, but it is not difficult to decide that the concerns and 
blessings of the inner life are most worthy of thought. The 
largest element of personality is from that source, and that 
of itself seals its preeminence. The happiness which we get 
from ourselves is far greater than that which comes from 
our surroundings. 

Here it is that the uses of meditation and introspection come 
in. Silence is the native atmosphere of an ideal personality— 
not the silence of the cloister or the hermitage, but the season- 
able and healthy silence that follows activity. In the moods 
produced by such silence the life is savingly revealed to itself. 
The silence-born moods are also the moods of the divine com- 
munication. What is the showing of life to itself but a divine 
communication? What is the empowered consciousness but 
the nascent spring of the life from above? The living per- 
sonality of man but answers the being of Jehovah. 

This shows how completely life is made to depend on its 
own choices. Even the divine for which life was made must 
wait upon human will. Is not this a mystery of personality? 

The thing which science calls egoism is so nearly the same 
as personality that only a scientific distinction would reveal 
any difference. We are not concerned about that distinction 
here. For our use let egoism be the vaguer substance out of 
which personality comes — the sap, the flower before the fruit. 
To care for this ego — this self — in the natural, the lawful way 
is the highest virtue, as it is the first and highest duty. For 
until there is a perfect self there can be no perfect society. 
"A rational egoism," says Herbert Spencer, "so far from 
implying a more egoistic human nature, is consistent with a 
human nature that is less egoistic." The meaning of this is 
that a man delivers self into its fullest inheritance of con- 
sciousness and attainment, not for selfish ends but in answer 
to the truest necessity of life — his own life and that of the 
community, the universe. It is this that makes "happiness a 
particular kind of life." 

In the Indian Upanishads is read this : "Not for the hus- 
band's sake is a husband dear, but for the ego's sake; not for 
3 



34 



LIFE AT ITS BEST. 



the wife's sake is a wife dear, but for the ego's sake; not for 
the son's sake is a son dear, but for the ego's sake; . . . 
for the love of the ego is everything dear. . . . The ego 
must be seen, heard, apprehended, regarded, for by this 
means the All is known." A crude and childish philosophy, 
it may be, but it is an echo of the world-old sense of the 
majesty of the individuated creature who calls himself man. 
Another voice from the literature of which the Upanishads 
was a part says : "In the midst of the sun is the light, in the 
midst of the light is man, and in the midst of man is the soul." 
It is man — the solitary soul of destiny— that walks through 
these mysteries of being. He it is who, like the brown bee, 
gathers both sweet and bitter from the flowerings of life's 
triumphs and tragedies. He it is who can be weak and strong 
— who can play abject before destiny or cry: 

"Let Fortune empty all her quiver on me; 
I have a soul that like an empty shield 
Can take in all, and verge enough to spare." 

The measure of happiness attainable by each one is de- 
termined by his personality. The mind is the great arbiter of 
life. When the measure of one's thought becomes fixed, then 
the measure for happiness is fixed. Nothing that can be done 
for the man can undo his mental state. If his mental vision 
is narrow, his happiness is necessarily pitched on the plane 
of the senses. If this might have been remedied, it becomes 
too late at a given stage. The skull sutures become inflexible 
and the gray matter of the brain degenerates into juiceless 
cells and ropy fiber. Individuality settles itself into hopeless 
mediocrity or less. It is too common a condition; it is com- 
mon enough, alas ! to be well-nigh a rule. 

The same may be said of the moral personality. It has its 
seasons of supreme possibility. If they pass unimproved, there 
comes a time when even grace is ineffective. There are few 
lives to which the inquiry, "What might have been?" doe? 
not apply. If to those who have found themselves, how much 
more to those who in failing to find themselves have lost the 
priceless pearl? 



THE MEANING OF PERSONALITY. 35 

Notwithstanding the secondary value of the study of 
heredity in a practical essay like this, it is well to think of 
personality in its largest relation. It is only by a due study 
of the past that we find our places in the present. It is the 
beat of the universal heart that quickens our own. 

Every man who wills to be made into his best must draw 
upon the life of the past. It takes a thousand years tc make 
a man — that is, the man of a type. The passions, hopes, and 
powers of the race beat with hands of desire the substance of 
life until it bounds into an individuation, a personality which 
sums the past in one man. But ever here the man cooperates 
in his own making. It is by this means that each age has 
found its great man. Usually this man has emphasized per- 
sonality in one quality or characteristic, and one that answered 
the supreme call of his age. Thus Moses embodied the 
ethical instincts, Homer the emotional sense, Socrates the 
reasoning faculty, Phidias and Raphael the aesthetic tastes, 
and St. Paul the spiritual apprehension. These types are not 
the despair of the race, but are its hope. They should en- 
courage and not disparage our efforts at attainment. 

Both natural endowment and opportunity are elements in 
the exceptional successes of life ; but if the secret of person- 
ality were more diligently explored, the life above the com- 
monplace would not be so rare. Where mediocrity is one 
time the result of native limitations, it is a thousand times the 
result of choice or of unhelped ignorance. 

The advances of life in general increase the difficulties of 
the individual. The necessity for the inner mastery increases. 
It requires greater force to put the individual life forward. 
There are no more heroes and demigods. Heroism, in the 
classic sense, is the commonplace. Every man to-day must 
be a Hercules, an Atlas, or a Prometheus. Attainment is more 
difficult for genius than formerly. The English name of Hercu- 
les is Perseverance. Atlas has been surnamed the Strenuous. 

As the world quickens its pace and shortens its syllogism, 
the need for the personal initiative grows. Courage and 
choice must become an impulse, a swift habit. Men are de- 
ciding and acting in gusts of passion and amid electrical 



S6 LIFE AT ITS BEST. 

changes and replications. The moment brooks no delay, and 
he that finds no star within will find none in the sky without. 
The great and enduring world proceeds from within. On the 
crest of its own courage life rides into its best. 

That which counts in every life is the discovery of per- 
sonality. To be one's best and largest self in desire, in speech, 
in act is not only the measure of duty, but it is the place of 
soul rest. In a word, it is happiness. It is that which the 
poet loves to sing, the painter to paint, and the teacher to 
turn into a parable. Who knows himself until he has called 
his spirit out for action? Saul, the son of Kish, went out 
seeking a herd of asses and found a kingdom. He found more. 
He found his own life of prowess, and he remained a king 
until he lost that inner mastery. 

From pine and mountain barrens, out of cabin and hovels, 
have gone men who had no assets but their personalities, 
their aroused and empowered lives, to be the teachers, the 
leaders, and the soldiers of the nation. Men of this mold have 
their own world. They make it. 

Too many who find themselves well furnished begin to covet 
opportunities not at hand, and so they waste life in seeking 
ready-made what it was foredetermined they should them- 
selves create. Life is its own opportunity; true success comes 
from within. Not by any token of office, but by the life itself, 
must it be said: "This is a man." There is a recompense 
and there is a reward. The one is payment of shekels for 
labor done; the other is the return which the laborer finds in 
himself. The accidents of life fall away, but its personalities 
remain. 

A classic antiquity was fond of saying: "The poet is 
born ; the orator is made." Neither one nor the other is true, 
though each carries an element of truth. Poetry and oratory 
are nearly equally dependent upon endowment and training. 
A generous vocabulary is necessary to both, and this is ac- 
quired only through discipline. The much-vaunted "gift of 
language" is a myth. The royalty of genius is not to be 
denied, but it is a conquest more than an entailment. You 
cannot create sensibility, imagination, and personal magnetism 



THE MEANING OF PERSONALITY. 37 

by any manner of discipline; they are gifts of nature; but all 
men have them in their degree, and it is a question of thrust- 
ing them into the open and making them serve to the utmost. 

Personality has close affinity for religion. Freedom and 
faith are one in the last analysis. The justified man in the 
sense of the evangel is the man made ethically and intel- 
lectually free. 

"Free men freely work; 
Whoever fears God fears to sit at ease." 

In a bookstall I glanced through the newest books. From 
one I read this sentence : "The greatest thing that we know 
is man ; the greatest man that we know is Jesus Christ." For 
the sake of that saying I bought the book; and though it 
proved nearly the only great word of the essay, I felt that I 
had made a good investment. The human personality of Jesus 
is the greatest thought that ever came, or ever can come, to 
our world. It is the only thought which has ever perfectly 
illuminated the personality of each of us. It was the perfectly 
realized personality of the Son of Man that made him "purest 
among the mighty, mightiest among the pure." The same 
secret of personality in us will bring us into the likeness of 
Him who holds the incontestable preeminence of perfection. 

There is nothing too high for the healthy heart and tnte 
healthy brain to aspire to. It is the stadium contest of per- 
sonality. The man made courageous in his own right asks 
only for standing room; he can then acquire the territory 
which he needs. 

Thomas Carlyle's definition of the word "king" as "the can- 
ning man" becomes a parable which has illuminated history 
and literature. The races of the north early turned their eyes 
southward toward the sunny isles. To lead their galleys 
through the seas they chose them a king, a "canning man." 
So the sea kings. At last their feet were firmly set on Britain's 
soil, whence England and "greater England over the sea" — 
our blood, our civilization, our best. The goal is forever to 
"the canning man." 



THE INTELLECTUAL SELF. 






How many a rustic Milton has passed by, 
Stirling the speechless longings of his heart 
In unremitting drudgery and care ! 
How many a vulgar Cato has compelled 
His energies, no longer tameless then, 
To mold a pin or fabricate a nail ! 

— Shelley. 

Measure your mind's height by the shade it casts. 

—R. Browning. 



1T"*"~ 


-^Brl 



CHAPTER IV. 

THE INTELLECTUAL SELF. 

HE life without intellect is the life slighted by 
nature or cursed by misfortune. The life with 
a perverted or undeveloped intellect is the one 
which inspires pity and calls for heroic help 
from those who have help to give. 
The calamity of a malformed brain — belief in which as an 
exponent of many crimes is a late settlement in science — is 
as much greater than a malformed limb or spine as the func- 
tion of the brain surpasses the uses of these in the economy 
of the body. The brain is the seat of the intellect, and hence 
the tragical significance attending the work of nature in 
disposing its tissue and the after care of those charged with 
the responsibility of developing it. It would seem that in 
some way elementary studies in comparative craniology, or 
brain structure and development, might be carried on to su- 
preme advantage even in the primary schools. It is a thing 
that parents and teachers in every rank and department of 
pedagogy need to know. The preacher should pursue it as an 
important side study at least. It is preeminently in the pos- 
sibilities of that organ that "we are fearfully and wonderfully 
made." 

Science has not been more certain of any fact lying above 
the dead level of the material than of the transcendence of 
the intellect. In "The Substance of Faith," the latest volume 
of Sir Oliver Lodge, and from which I have already quoted, 
appear these words : "The faculties and achievements of 
the highest among mankind — in art, in science, in philosophy, 
in religion — are not explicable as an outcome of the struggle 
for existence. Something more than mere life is possessed 



42 LIFE AT ITS BEST. 

by us — something represented by the words 'mind' and 'soul' 
and 'spirit.' " 

No estimate or measure of life's good is thinkable that 
does not take in the intellectual self. It is not an absolute 
rule, but is one of general application, that the true happiness 
of life is measured by the intellect. It is certainly an absolute 
rule that happiness depends upon the use of the intellect. 
And this is the heart of the whole problem of education. 

It often happens that we come upon people of limited men- 
tal vision whose contentment and whose enjoyment of what 
life has brought seem complete. This is, in fact, a common 
condition. But inquiry will reveal that upon one or two 
points at least, and usually upon that of religion, the intellect 
has been well aroused, and its use in this particular accounts 
for the general serenity of the life. But it will not be con- 
tended that, except in the single matter of savoring, this state 
is one to be thought of as a goal. Its best falls far short of 
the ideal best of even a commonplace intellectual lot which 
has been brought to see its possibilities. A life narrowed at 
any point by its own consent has the consciousness of im- 
poverishment, and hence to that degree has lack of joy. 

Scientific definitions are not attempted in these lectures ; 
but it is well enough to say that by intellect is understood the 
sum of the knowing and perceiving powers of the man. Sense 
and imagination only are excluded from this unity, if indeed 
they are to be wholly excluded. What the voice is to the 
physical life, the intellect is to the nonphysical. Like the 
voice, the intellect is susceptible of limitless cultivation. As 
the voice can be brought to reduplicate itself in endless into- 
nations, so the intellect may be led into an infinite multiplica- 
tion of thought. As the voice by means of inflections and 
sympathetic modulations becomes an echo of the passions, so 
the intellect by means of concentration and association comes 
to be the echo of the most recondite things of the invisible, as 
of the visible, world. 

The voice and the intellect are indeed most closely related. 
Words and thoughts are necessary to each other. Without an 
adequacy of words ideas are inchoate, and without well-or- 



THE INTELLECTUAL SELF. 43 

ganized ideas words are but unbridled sounds. The training 
of the intellect and the voice therefore constitutes what is 
commonly meant by education or culture. 

This is indeed a generous half of culture; but no more. We 
cannot forget how much the soul, the feelings are involved in 
the process. The life consciousness of which I have con- 
stantly spoken as a necessary condition of true and successful 
living particularly involves the intellect. The life which 
is not persistently and tremendously reminded of its in- 
tellectual self will inevitably fall below its standard and 
fail of its best. 

The old proverb of chivalry, "Nobility obliges/' is pitched 
to the thought that nobility is always conscious of its nobler 
self. It is this ever-quickened sense that compels. Intellect 
in like manner obliges, being the true nobility. It compels 
to thought; but it must be kept ever upon the keen edge of 
alertness and action, or it will quickly sink into self-oblivious- 
ness, which is not far removed from intellectual death. 

With the power and habit of connected and steady thought 
the life is not only fitted for action and service, but is also 
fortified against the ills to which it would otherwise become 
a prey. Melancholia and pessimism are all but impossible to 
the active intellect — the conscious intellect, I may say — the 
one that has discovered its ideals among the fixed and en- 
during things of life and truth. 

The greatest of the philosophers have illustrated to us the 
supremacy of intellect over the material adjuncts of life. 
Socrates and Seneca particularly employed their philosophy, 
which was only the channel of their intellects, in neutralizing 
the misfortunes which came upon them in their last days. 
They had so aligned their intellects with what they perceived 
to be the unchanging soul of the universe that what to the un- 
enlightened had seemed the sum of all evil to them seemed 
but irrelevant and transitory incident. 

It is through the intellect that religion and the other sub- 
lime emotions and instincts make their appeal and get an en 
during hold upon the unseen. Human liberty has had its- 
dwelling place through the ages in the emancipated and self- 



44 LIFE AT ITS BEST. 

mastered intellect of the reformer and the martyr. Bonnivard, 
"the prisoner of Chillon," is an immortal type : 

"Eternal Spirit of the chainless Mind ! 
Brightest in dungeons, Liberty ! thou art, 
For there thy habitation is the heart — 
The heart which love of thee alone can bind." 

The sublimation of this mastery appears in the well-tested 
spirit of him whose mind had wrought with the ultimate prob- 
lems of evil and whose body had felt the rod and the knout, 
and yet who was able to say: "None of these things move 
me." Such is the courage of a mind that has looked itself 
through and covenanted with itself to endure. 

There is no bondage like that of ignorance; no poverty is 
like it. There is no largess like the rewards that flow in 
upon the mind that lends itself to pure and unselfish think- 
ing. And here is perhaps the rub. Unselfishness in thought 
is as important as unselfishness in act and service. I mean 
by this that in all our thinking, whether about domestic and 
social concerns, commerce, science, public affairs, or religion, 
our intellectual motive should always be beyond cavil or the 
question of one's own conscience. The least of our mental 
concerns should be used as steps to lead us up to the highest 
and noblest thoughts. This can be only when a genuine sin- 
cerity governs our every mental movement. 

To the trained and unselfish intellect there is pleasure un- 
alloyed in thinking, in wondering, and in imagining. There 
are times, in fact, when these processes become transports. 
At such times and in such way the world of sense commingles 
with the world of ethereal substances, and fellowship is had 
with spirits regnant otherwhere, spirits 

"Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, 
And the round ocean and the living air 
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man." 

Great thinkers, men whose one business it has been to think 
their way into the profoundest mysteries of life and the uni- 



THE INTELLECTUAL SELF. 45 

verse, have been often so lost in their intellectual processes as 
to become oblivious to their surroundings and even to forget 
to take their needed food. It was this life transport which 
the Master described when he said to his disciples: "I have 
bread to eat that ye know not of." An intellectual joy only 
less than his is possible to us. 

There is nothing that needs to be so constantly conscious of 
itself as the intellect, and yet nothing which, when at its best, 
is so careful not to parade itself or make a boast of its doings. 
If there be a higher self in man than the intellectual — and 
assuredly there is— it still must depend upon the intellect for 
a voice and for a way to make its faith effective. There can 
therefore be no trepidation of life so unjustifiable as that 
which discounts the intellectual self lest the soul or the 
higher self be dishonored. That part of man which thinks is 
the part which shows his kinship with Jehovah. 

The highest self, or soul, so little understood, is not of our 
making, being the image of the invisible ; but the intellectual 
is made, expanded, and matured under natural processes and 
rules of training. It is brought up by means of smitings and 
shapings and fiery enjoinings from the inchoate into order, 
strength, and godlike movements. It is in dealing with the in- 
tellect that we are the makers of our destiny and become 
truly "workers together with Him." 

To be seized and possessed of one's intellectual self is the 
first duty of life. It is, moreover, a duty from which no sta- 
tion or fortune of life excuses, and a right which no misfor- 
tune can alienate. This is the first element in the problem of 
education, the secret and seal of culture. Knowledge acquired 
on any other basis is mechanical and unavailable. 

It must not, however, be forgotten that to reach life's in- 
tellectual best the most practical and matter-of-fact methods 
should be employed. There is no royal path to success. The 
footpath which alone leads to the house of knowledge must 
be trodden alike by the son of the prince and the son of the 
peasant. This understanding is vastly important; the seeker 
must know himself a plodder. And yet — here is the crux of 
the educational problem of to-day — there must enter into 



46 LIFE AT ITS BEST. 

training and effort a spirit above the practical and matter-of- 
fact. Else what becomes of the repeated asseveration made 
in these pages ? To the practical and matter-of-fact in method 
must be added this above all — namely, the living conscious- 
ness of an intellectual self. There must be personal and 
direct dealing with our own rights and powers. 

Who will provide a means by which this rationale of educa- 
tion can be given a chair in every school, college, and univer- 
sity in the land? Who will undertake to make it the touch- 
stone of the thinker in public and private station? What in- 
tellectual dynamo is adjustable to the elaborate machinery of 
our modern educational system that the applying youth may 
first be shocked into the consciousness of those powers which 
are to be evoked and educated? 

Universal culture is the necessary condition of universal 
civilization. Civilization is as yet not even a veneer ; it is a 
garment which covers the race in spots only. Even in Chris- 
tian States this is true. It is a mistaken notion that any pan 
of the fabric of civilization rests on the service or the office 
of ignorance. Society survives in spite of its unlettered mem 
bers. 

The most menial station in a civilized community is not in- 
compatible with genuine culture, though some stations are 
confessedly unfavorable to its larger development. Since 
the world's Redeemer was in his youth a carpenter and since 
his greatest apostle while evangelizing the learned seats of the 
ancient world followed the craft of a tent maker, it is not 
possible to think of any honorable or needed calling as being 
prohibitive of the fact or even the graces of true culture. This 
is confessedly a bold, if not a startling, asseveration ; but it is 
the popular skepticism on this point which has made it seem 
impossible. The same skepticism has acted as a barrier to 
its more frequent realization, and has become a bale star over 
every cradle rocked by the hand of poverty. 

The hod carrier, the plowman, the blacksmith, the laborer 
have better promise of skill in their work and fortitude in 
adversity as self-discipline (where so much needed) by reason 
of an education that has passed beyond the technique of their 



THE INTELLECTUAL SELF. 47 

calling into the higher tastes. The strength of the larger man- 
hood is also assured, through these. The best of a narrow 
range is made apparent, and the dark way of poverty is 
lighted by a lamp that burns within. Knowledge may bring 
hunger and a larger want; but it is good to hunger and to 
know want, for these are means by which heaven delivers uv 
into the larger life. 

Culture is not in reading and mastering many books, but 
in using few or many as the means of bringing out the largest 
impulses of the intellectual and emotional natures and of 
adding the largest territory of outside ideas to the inner life 
Culture is what is brought to a man as the fertilizer of his 
nature and a sustenance to his intellect. 

It is settled that education must develop and train the think- 
ing faculties; that it must maintain and tone up the moral 
faculties. It must give defmiteness of aim and life purpose to 
the student. It must prophesy his career in the constant call. 
"Know thyself." Much, far too much, of the education of the 
present lacks in defmiteness; but its supreme defect is in its 
misdirected force. A little learning is not a dangerous thing 
if it be true learning, but is good and safe. 

It is a mistaken notion that books are the only means of 
culture. This belief has led many to become mere book 
worms, stuffed with undigested thoughts gormandized from 
the stores of other men's gathering. Books are a prime and 
indispensable means of culture, but it is not always true that 
they are the chief means of stirring or storing the intellect 
Verily, there were men before there were books, and men who 
bore in themselves the substance of all the books to be. A 
picture or a statue may be as truly read and studied as a 
book, and surely living men in their goings and comings and 
"the human face divine" are more than galleries and museum? 
and more than scrolls and books. And in nature, in moun 
tains, seas, and forest worlds, are there not to be found the 
helps and inspirations of the truest and the highest culture r 
Is not 

"Earth crammed with heaven 
And every common bush afire with God?" 



THE CURE OF THE SOUL. 



O let the false dreams fly 

Where our sick souls do lie, 

Tossing continually. 

O where thy voice doth come 

Let all doubts be dumb; 

Let all words be mild, 

All strife be reconciled, 

All pains beguiled. 

Light brings no blindness ,. 

Love no unkindness. 

Knowledge no ruin, 

Fear no undoing 

From the cradle to the grave — 

Save, O save ! — Matthew Arnold. 







CHAPTER V. 

THE CURE OF THE SOUL. 

MONG the powers and parts of life the soul is 
preponderant and supreme. It is only in ac- 
commodated terms that we can speak of the 
soul as a possession; it is masterful. I have 
=2U no soul; I am a soul. From the palms of my 
feet and the crown of my head to the uttermost tips of my 
ringers I am a living soul. When 1 deal with that soul. 1 
deal with myself. 

[n the days of its simplicity the Church named the search 
for the lost and the ministry of help the cure of souls. The 
term has a beautiful and suggestive meaning. It smells of 
balm and "myrrh and cassia out of the ivory palaces." Soul 
redemption is the end of the order of the moral universe. 
The gospel is the divine scheme for- realizing this redemp- 
tion. Christ is the Healer. "There is a Power in the uni- 
verse vastly beyond our comprehension ; and we trust and 
believe it is a good and loving Power able and willing to help 
us. . . . It was manifested to dwellers on this planet in 
the life of Jesus Christ, through whose Spirit and loving in- 
fluence the race of man may hope to rise to heights at pres- 
ent inaccessible." 

For the cure of souls in general there is an organized min- 
istry of help and teaching; but the cure of each soul is at 
last with itself; it is its own minister, its own priest. Sacra- 
ments, ordinances, and doctrines are tokens of grace. The 
realities of blood and fire and spirit are with the living soul. 
apart in the holy of holies of its own being. 

The largest human element in religion is purpose. The 
measure of this must be full, complete in order to testify 
a saving sincerity. There is a standard of negative blame- 
lessness to which the majority of men are to be referred. 



3~ 7 LIFE AT. ITS BEST. 

There is a mediocrity of virtue, as of mental attainment, and 
there is a dark particularity of sin and dishonor. There is 
also a distinguishing eminence of purity and manly upright- 
ness. This is attained in the measure of the life's purpose 
which becomes faith and experience. "The violent take it by 
force." 

The doctrine of consciousness preached in connection with 
die intellectual self is tremendously emphasized in the realm 
of the soul. There is no relevancy in religion without it 
The "rejoicing" of which the Pauline Epistles make so much 
comes of this consciousness in religion. Here is established 
the soul's affinity with God, who 

"tastes an infinite joy 
In infinite ways — one everlasting bliss 
From whom all being emanates, all power 
Proceeds." 

Fht birth from above, the witness divine, the dedicated and 
purified life are the large, enduring terms that expound 
this consciousness. The wisest ages of Christian faith have 
been the apostolic and that of the accentuated evangelism of 
the present. In these the call was, and is, to the individual 
*oul. Truth is not sought in outside pageantries, but its trage- 
dies and life-making power are reenacted in the soul. Calvary 
and Olivet and Pentecost become subjective. The life nascent 
answers to the Life preeminent. 

Let no soul of man fear to take for their full meaning all 
the dread, high words that from old describe the manner of 
making the life whole. No more let him stumble at those 
which describe our soul maladies. Sin is a fact, sad at first, 
then bitter, then hideous and hateful. For the first it is 
found in unchosen conditions; for the second it is the oc- 
casion of hopeless struggle ; and for the last it is the letter of 
consent and slavish submission. Sin is the choice of evil 
by one who sees the good and to whom the good is possible 
A radical view of sin lies at the bottom of a healthy religious 
experience. 

Penitence — the fiery first motions of that consciousness 



THE CURE OF THE SOUL. 53 

which is life out of and above the sensuous — and faith and 
holiness are facts to build with at the foundation. New 
terms too often come of the half-conscious wish to be rid 
of old truths and their consequences. The light is cruel to 
purblind eyes; but the soul that seeks the best will face the 
unclouded sun. 

The preeminent concern of life is personal religion. x\nd 
this not as a settlement of one's case against the judgmem 
to come, but as a settlement of the needs of life. In those 
needs are the conditions of a perpetual judgment. Salvation 
is not deliverance from penalty only; it is deliverance into 
life, the beginning again of the incarnation, whereby Christ 
is formed in each believer. 

A specious sentimentality about religion, and even about 
religions, is sometimes accounted faith. There are religions, 
but one only is transcendent, divine. "There are comparative 
religions, but Christianity is not one of them." The religion 
of Jesus is a personal religion. Knowledge— experimental 
knowledge — of the absolute Personality in this religion is the 
faith that brings life to its best. 

There is also a theory, accepted in one way or another 
by many devout people, that religion is an obtainment rather 
than an attainment. This is contrary to the laws of nature 
and grace alike. Given life, natural and spiritual, Heaven 
expects us to reach the goal of completeness through obedi 
ence and conquest. It were as logical to imagine learning 
and culture as a gift out of hand. Obtainment indeed fol- 
lows attainment. "To him that hath it shall be given." Age 
is put so far from youth that effort may avail, So run .thai 
ye may obtain. 

"Each man makes his own stature, builds himself; 
Virtue alone outbuilds the pyramids; 
Her monuments shall last when Egypt's fall — 
'Tis moral grandeur makes the mighty man." 

The whole personal equation in religion comes of the Per 
sonal Christ. Had the Evangel been a system of philosophy, 
it had been impersonal, and its effect on men had been im- 



54 LIFE AT ITS BEST. 

personal also. But the story is so slight as to miss the chance 
of being a system, and this purposely. The precious mys- 
teries of thirty years of the Life and the wisdom of unnum 
bered sayings of the Teacher were caught away as were tht 
odors of the "hundredweight" of spices. Enough only re 
mains to forever reveal the Personality. 

No demonstration can be more absolute, no science more 
exact, no philosophy more profound than this, that in the 
Nazarene are the fountains and springs which feed the full- 
brimmed rivers of conscious personal salvation. 

A modern pathologist suggests the use of music in treating 
mental and nervous disorders. Mental robustness depends 
upon the obedience of the intellect to harmonious order. Music, 
it is contended, has power to restore momentarily this dis- 
turbed order. In that moment haply the intellect may spring 
again to its seat. The religion of Jesus is one prolonged har 
mony which restores and maintains in their play the powers 
of mind and soul. High-pressure life must have high-pres- 
sure religion. 

The verification of personal religion is in a double appeal. 
It must answer to the inerrant written Word. It will be tes- 
tified to by the Divine Spirit. In this testimony it is com- 
pleted. 

I cannot refrain from tracing here an enticing and in- 
structive parallel. The Bible is from God; it is his Word. 
To doubt or diminish that tenet is to remove the founda- 
tions. That the Bible is a message from God, infallible in 
spirit and word, is a truth consonant with the view that our 
lives are also directly from him. They are complementing 
<deas and stand together. 

The humanity of God and the divinity of man are the large 
lerms of the written revelation. This is the meaning of the 
Tncarnation, which calls for a revelation without lack or flaw. 
The Word was made flesh." The perfect Word dwelt in 
human flesh. The perfect Revelation was committed to hu- 
man speech. This it is that makes personal faith possible. 

Personal religion falls in naturally with workyday duties. 
There is but one life, and that life describes the sanctification 



THE CURE OF THE SOUL. 55 

of the whole mind, soul, and body. That means the committal 
of the private, domestic, commercial, and political concerns 
to one issue— the merging of them in a comprehensive and 
compleiing consciousness. When it is seen that it is only 
natural and sensible to be religious, to pray, to worship God, 
and render service as a disciple, then indeed wiil all the prob- 
lems of life be simplified. But this possibility comes only of 
a passion; It is promoted by a visitation. It is the secret of 
the just 

Repentance and faith are spontaneous personal acts, with 
of course divine incentives. They are movements toward 
God. The cherubs seen in Raphael's masterpieces were at 
first street gamins who climbed to the window sill of the 
artist's studio to gaze upon the unfinished picture of the 
Christ-child. This adoring attitude suggested to the artist 
that their faces, transformed into the image of cherubs, be 
set in the halo about the head of the Christ-child. Thus 
they became immortal. It is in the soul vision of the Christ 
that we make ourselves partakers of his life and glory. 

Religion consists not in doing the things that Jesus did in 
his earthly walks, nor yet the things which it might be sup- 
posed he would do were he now on earth, but in having his 
Spirit. And what is this but that the Christ, the living One, 
lives in our thoughts, our motives, our desires? We are com- 
plete in him. 

Personal religion is personal purity. This is the infallible 
test. Innocence is natural or attributed; purity is acquired or 
attained. It is a fountain opened within the life. Or if it 
were better said, innocency is foundation; purity, what is 
built thereupon. 

There is no strength like that of innocency; there is no 
power like that of purity. The teachings and interpretations 
of religion become plain in the understanding that they mak- 
for one end— purity. There is no real wisdom or faith aside 
from those which help to that end. Purity is the first of the 
Beatitudes. It is the abiding element of life, the residuum of 
history which transforms and perpetuates the race. 

The gospel to be preached in our time, as in all times, is 



56 LIFE AT ITS BEST. 

purity for its own sake, purity as its own reward. What 
greater reward than strength of spirit to do as one listeth in 
noble resolve? The laureate makes his maiden knight to say: 
'My strength is as the strength of ten because my heart is 
pure." Purity becomes intensified sight. The pure in heart 
>hail see God. It becomes reenforcement to sinew and mus- 
:le. It rides fearlessly through paynim lands. It is the vic- 
tory that overcometh. 

Every life of youth begins not far from strength and 
vision. Joseph and Daniel, Jehoshaphat and Edward VI. in 
the wide rooms of history illustrate the purity and vision pos- 
sible to all. The differences of men at their beginnings are 
far less than we usually suspect. Grace is benign, and na- 
ture leans to the impartial law. 

There are three words that seem now to complete what 
remains to be said in this study. These words are love, 
prayer, growth. The empowered and purified life perfect* 
itself in these experiences. 

These lectures are no more technically theological than the> 
are scientific. They look at every attitude and movement of 
life from the experimental. They are meant to be inspira- 
tional; but I purposely keep close to the form of sound words, 
though a less used one might be equally expressive. For the 
same reason I make my appeal to the simplest duties and ex- 
periences of the Christian life, though I trust to raise the in 
centives and springs of personal religion above the common 
place of preaching. 

That love which a Christian man must feel and in the glow 
of which he must live is so much a matter of his conscious 
ness that to a large extent it must be identified with it. Love 
is, in fact, the consciousness of the soul life. It is purity in 
motion. No purity, no love, as no vision. And love is greatei 
than any vision, for it is the possession and use of all, thus 
completing both faith and hope. It is easy to see by this that 
love is "the greatest thing in the world." 

Love has two offices. One is to look up to the higher and 
draw loveliness down upon itself, and the other is to regard 
the lowlier and confer loveliness upon it. Without one or 



THE CURE OF THE SOUL. 57 

the other of these offices love is not. That which takes it* 
holy name, lacking its soul, is lust or selfishness. 

Love is the absolute of personality. The lesser is born oi 
the higher. We love God because he loved us. Science 
knows something about providence. Of love it knows notb 
ing. How could it? It is impersonal. It sees nature careful 
of the type, but careless of the individual. But I am an in- 
dividual. I cannot hear to perishing; I cry out for eternal 
life. A Soul calls to me out of infinity. I joyfully answer 
The fellowship that follows is love. I learn in that fellowship 
a perfect trust. The fruit is that perfect love which casteth 
out fear. 

This love is voluntary and answers to reason. I can lovt 
whatsoever I will, given that it is worthy of my love. I must 
choose to love those who can confer loveliness, as I must 
choose to love those upon whom I can confer what I havt 
received. But the perfect grace of this love is possible onh 
to the soul whose depths have been stirred and flooded with 
the Love Divine. 

What I trust to show here is how every life may become- 
the means of awakening itself not to penitence only but to 
the consciousness of the highest attainments. Thought is the 
first tremendous word. Think on the so great glory of being 
alive; then on the greater glory of that life to which yours 
answers. Think on the joy of being merged into that life 
Think these thoughts on your knees. 

Prayer is not petition only; it is worship. It is holy con 
templation. It is the gate to consciousness. Every devout 
and unselfish thought is; and so every devout and unselfish 
thought is prayer. But let there be crucial prayer — prayer oi 
the bended knee, the covered face, and the communing heart ; 

"The consecrated hour 
Of man in converse with the deity." 

It is in consciousness that spiritual growth is marked. We 
shall not say, "This day I have given alms and paid tithes ;*' 
nor yet "To-day I have solaced many sorrowful, relieved many 
that were burdened, and have walked as a disciple. Am 1 



58 LIFE AT ITS BEST. 

not well on the way to meet the Lord?" Nay! but above and 
before all these, and as explaining them : "I have deepened 
my sense and joy of life and have enlarged my hold upon thf 
invisible." 

"Life eternal in its fullest sense must be entered upon here 
and now. The emphasis is on life, without reference to 



THE GOSPEL OF THE BODY. 



Over our manhood bend the skies ; 

Against our fallen traitor lives 
The great winds utter prophecies ; 

With our faint hearts the mountain strives ; 
Its arms outstretched, the druirl wood 

Waits with its benedicite ; 
And to our age's drowsy blood 

Still shouts the inspiring sea. 

— Lozveli 



CHAPTER VI. 
THE GOSPEL OF THE BODY. 




N all that has been ascribed to the higher con- 
sciousness, or life sense, as the spring of per- 
sonality, intellect, and soul, the body plays an 
important part. It is to these what the reeds or 
strings of the instrument are to the harmony. 
The rift within the lute balks the soul of the musician. A 
depraved or unsubdued body defeats the spirit for whose 
use it was shaped. 

Life at its best calls for a healthy, well-developed body, and 
one guarded against the invasion of obstructive and perversive 
influences. Happiness as the immediate fruit of living is 
most largely dependent upon the state of the body. The 
soul and the intellect when made free may reach a felicitous 
poise in the face of hereditary misfortunes, disease, or bodily 
deformity; but this comes only after struggle and the creation 
of ideals of happiness out of the ordinary. 

It would seem that the body, being the most obvious ex- 
pression of life, would be the best understood of all. But 
this is not the case. Both to the individual and to science 
after a certain stage of investigation is reached the higher 
relations of physical human life become elusive. It thus hap- 
pens that science has had to return from a comparative mas- 
tery of psychology to a fresh survey of the hinterland of the 
physical nature. Skepticism is making its last stand at the 
body, the place at which the sublunary and the sublimal meet. 
There also faith must win its last victory and science must 
complete its investigations. 

There is a gospel of the body no less than of the soul. In 
fact, the body is of the soul by way of inclusion and vas- 
salage. "Philosophy resents any sharp distinction between 
soul and body — between indwelling self and material ve- 



62 LIFE AT ITS BEST. 

hide — it prefers to treat the self as a whole, an individual 
unit, though it may admit the actual agglomeration of ma- 
terial particles to be transient and temporary." More than 
philosophy, the Scriptures are insistent upon this point of the 
inclusion of the body in the enduring selfhood of life. It is 
the ground of the Incarnation. It is a major content of the 
gospel. 

The spiritual self (including soul and intellect) does not 
grow up within the body; but the body grows up about it, 
the product and manifestation of it. That it is which gives 
the nobler fashion to our frames that otherwise do not differ 
from the bodies of the brutes. It is that that makes the man, 
the anthropos. 

The miracles of regeneration apply to both soul and body. 
The Galilean life "shows us that the whole man can be re- 
generated as he stands ; that we have not to wait for a future 
state; that the kingdom of heaven is in our mid'st and may 
be assimilated by us here and now." 

In truth, "the redemption of our bodies" is not to be con- 
sidered as an amendatory scheme, but as a process, inherited 
from the making of man, to perfect the body and the soul 
together. The connection between spirit and matter is good. 
Life unifies spirit and body. The doctrines and sacraments 
of Christianity expound this mystery. The humanity of God 
and the divinity of man are the largest terms of revelation. 
Body is the sequence of spirit. Humanity is equally the se- 
quence of Godhood. 

"None but God could build this house of ours, 
So beautiful, vast, various, so beyond 
All work of man, yet, like all work of man, 
A beauty with defect— till that which knows, 
And is not known, but felt through what we feel 
Within ourselves is highest, shall descend 
On this half deed, and shape it at the last 
According to the highest in the highest." 

The redemption of life not only includes the body, but be- 
gins with it. Miracles were first wrought upon the body not 



THE GOSPEL OF THE BODY. 63 

alone to illustrate the effect of divine power upon the soul, 
but to show that it was forever operative upon both soul and 
body. The point at which Christian theology began first to 
go seriously astray was in the notion that the body was es- 
sentially evil. A recovered ideal of the body is a recovered 
theology. 

The duty which life owes to itself is an undivided one; but 
the earliest act in the performance of this duty should be to 
secure the body — that is, to make out of every situation of life 
the best possible provision for it. This rule would hold though 
it were made evident that bodily sacrifice, even ultimate cruci- 
fixion, was the highest duty of the individual. The best under 
even that condition must be provided. Socrates and Sir 
Thomas More, representative spirits ©f widely separated 
eras, illustrated this sense of self-duty in extremity. While 
the hemlock climbed through his blood the Greek did not fail 
to observe the amenities, nor yet the matters of behavior 
which had made his body so fit an instrument of his intellect. 
The Briton, while yet the headsman held the uplifted ax, 
composed himself in such careful manner as he was wont to 
do at table or in his daily tasks. An accused man who was 
five times tried for his life and who spent seven years in 
prison, always in the shadow of death, is said to have taken 
his daily exercise, guarded his diet, and in every way cared 
for his body as though he walked in freedom and life secure. 
The lesson is an obvious one. 

To make unnecessary demands upon the body, to neglect it, 
to impair it without reason is to abuse a divine mechanism, 
for which answer must be made at last. A sin against the 
body is a sin against the whole life. 

It has often happened that the greatest intellects and the 
happiest spirits have been found in diseased or undersized 
bodies. Whether these come under the exceptional head of 
geniuses or whether they are to be ascribed to extraordinary 
efforts incited by misfortune may well remain a speculative 
matter. It shows the benignity of nature in dealing with her 
less fortunate children. It also shows the power of spirit 
to span the breaches of the physical. A great master can 



64 LIFE AT ITS BEST. 

evoke more harmony from a single string of his violin than 
an ameteur can from the whole bridge. 

All things being equal, however, a healthy and perfectly 
disciplined body goes with a normal intellect and a normally 
developed ethical sense. There is something more than chance 
in both the form and the stature of life. Deviation from the 
ideal is due to untoward causes, either in heredity or habit. 
In the lower animal species, where there is a stricter obedience 
to particular law, though it be but the law of instinct, the in- 
dividuals at maturity reach something like a common de- 
velopment. Man has a more complex law to obey, and hence 
a greater opportunity to invite penalties. 

But there is no absolute standard of the human body knowli 
to us. The troglodytes were giants, while civilized man has 
apparently gradually decreased in his physical habit. It seems 
natural that physical grossness should diminish under in- 
creasing intellectuality. Thought and emotion have a tend- 
ency to make the fleshly fiber resilient. The wood of the 
almug shell alters under the harmonies that ring through it. 

Physical life is cellular, and a thousand things may de- 
crease or increase its complement of cells. Different kinds of 
equally wholesome food may effect the growing stature. Flesh 
is not life. Too many cells in the body may be as great a dis- 
advantage as too few. Yet there is a place at which the ag- 
gregate of healthy cells reaches the healthy measure. The 
true regimen of life is to bring the body up to that point of 
healthiness and maintain it there until it has served its use 
and dissolution comes as naturally as the falling of a leaf. 

It cannot be doubted that in a near-approaching century 
the race will reach a state of practical immunity from sickness, 
both hereditary and contracted, and it may be that something 
like uniformity of stature may be attained. Faith and science 
conspire in prophesying the triumph over disease. It should 
be the purpose of every empowered life to realize the ideal 
now, to bring the body into its true inheritance, and main- 
tain it there. Many have done so, and many more will. 

This is the basis of the efficient life. The body which an- 
swers the highest use is the one tempered and restrained at 



THE GOSPEL OF THE BODY. 65 

every point. Not the one asceticised, but the one fitted for 
action in the arena and for contests where temptations walk 
in the streets and 1 stalk in the market place. 

Healthiness means many things when applied to the body. 
Adipose may be 'disease. A human brain may weigh the 
requisite forty-four ounces, but may be only mutton suet. 
Many a body that might have stood for the stature of a 
Greek god has housed the soul of a fatted sheep. 

The so-called athletics of our time are to be esteemed 
little short of a curse. Physical development is supposed to 
be aimed at; but, in fact, they dwarf the physical man at the 
most essential points. Muscle is not the most necessary thing 
in physical manhood. It is the part of the body which, along 
with appetite, is nearest animality. Developed beyond a cer- 
tain point, it tends to truculence and brutality. The pugilist 
is the most poorly developed physical member of the race. 
His muscle has enslaved every other physical function. The 
longevity of a race of muscular giants would soon sink to 
that of the ox or the horse. It is brain and not muscle that 
is most tenacious of vitality. 

The erection of athletics into a profession has been one of 
the ruinous blunders of modern times. The Greeks, whom our 
athletic faddists fancy themselves to be imitating, had no such 
idea of their games. The programme of the Olympiad began 
with a foot race, but ended with a tragic poem or an oration. 
Our modern athletic contests begin with a murderous scram- 
ble for the "pigskin" and end with a column of jargon in the 
daily newspaper. 

The necessary and proper labors of life furnish, in the main, 
the exercise needed to develop the body. In a sedentary call- 
ing extra exercise should be taken of as nearly the kind and 
as nearly in the manner as that which a normal task would 
furnish. It should be such exercise as will keep the whole 
body active. Mountain-climbing, country walks, flower- 
hunting, social and sympathetic visiting are conducive to a 
complete bodily development, and in that way which naturally 
shades the sensuous into the intellectual and spiritual. The 
usual athletic programme breaks down far short of this. The 
5 



66 LIFE AT ITS BEST. 

sum of it may be realized in the use of a pair of dumb-bells 
or a horizontal bar. 

The statement that thinking and wondering are on one side 
physical exercises may appear novel, but it is true. A Ger- 
man scholar resolved to compel his hatter to lengthen his hat 
band. By processes of mental concentration he so increased 
his brain cells as to require a larger cranial cavity. The bone 
structure expanded, and the hatter fashioned another hat block 
for his customer. 

The physical path of the emotions is widened every time a 
sure-footed instinct or impulse passes over it. Sympathy, 
friendship, and kindness not only leave residues of sweetness 
and grace in the soul, but they vitalize and normalize the 
fiber of the body. Unquestionably the formulary of the resur- 
rection is suggested in this. "Avoid," says Lord Bacon, 
"envy, anxious fears, fretting in words, subtle and knotty 
inquisitions, joys and exhilarations in excess, sadness nol 
communicated." 

The use of musical instruments, especially the violin, the 
pedal organ, and the piano, ministers in a double exercise to 
the aesthetic and the physical natures. Extemporaneous ora- 
tory is preeminently a discipline of the whole man, physical and 
nonphysical. No wonder the old master of oratory defined 
its first principle as "Action" and the second and the third 
likewise as "Action." 

Professor Haeckel, of Jena, describes the human body as 
an empire or a republic made up of provinces or states, con- 
sisting in the aggregate of many trillions of cells each of 
which is a life center all conspiring to make the one conscious 
life of the man. The regimen of the body must reach each 
of these myriad cells in the way either of liberation or re- 
straint, and this when perfectly done is health and life. 

Tradition gave to St. Paul a mean and undersized body, 
and hints at a chronic infirmity; but the sight of him before 
the Areopagus is of a man whose mastery, or "keeping under," 
of his body made it the fit vehicle of his tremendous and his 
tory-making personality. 

Everybody is familiar with the process by which the blind 



THE GOSPEL OF THE BODY. 67 

develop in the sense of touch a second eyesight. This il- 
lustrates . the effect of the intellect on the physical senses. 
Helen Keller, the deaf-blind girl, is the highest example of it. 
These miracles wrought in the unfortunate should supply a 
boundless inspiration to the sound of body. 

Whatever one's physical lot, the call is to make the best of 
it. Misfortune may be made a providence, while a happy 
physical lot may through abuse stifle the very soul itself. A 
feeble body is compensated for in a robust intellect and a 
soul superior to rheum and bacilli. 

To this lecture belong a few friendly cautions concerning 
appetite and those indulgences which a positive science and a 
long experience show to be deleterious to the body and by 
this token to the mind. 

Dietectic fads are perhaps the most absurd of all. The rule 
for the table should be a common sense one. What is to be 
cooked should be cooked sensibly; every one who eats should 
know something of the science of cookery. Eat what you 
require; no more, and seldom less. It was Celsus who said: 
"Use fasting and full eating, but rather full eating" — that 
is, a full satisfying of hunger. High thinking calls for high 
living on plain fare well prepared and enough of it. Make as 
close a connection as you can with the gardener, the fisherman, 
and the butcher. You may safely wait three days for the 
baker. Make few demands of the delicatessen man. 

Life at its physical best is lived much in the open air 
or at least where it is easy to keep the lungs filled with pure 
air. Add to vital air, sunshine, and proper food the matter 
of pure water, for its double use, and the ministry to the 
body is largely told. Sensible attire and sensible beds are 
also important matters. 

Narcotics, stimulating beverages, and nerve-exciting decoc- 
tions have no place in an ideal physical regimen. Any one 
who will may satisfy himself of the soundness of this obser- 
vation. However these agencies might sometimes be pre- 
scribed as correctives or as remedies, they are not required as 
aids or helps to a healthy body. Whatever of this nature is a 
latent need in the physical organism is supplied in the cereals 
and vegetables that make up a healthy diet. 



HOW SHALL I BE TAUGHT? 



Men must be taught as if you taught them not, 
And things unknown proposed as things forgot. 

—Pope. 

Wisdom is ofttimes nearer when we stoop 

Than when we soar. — Wordsworth. 




CHAPTER VII. 

HOW SHALL I BE TAUGHT? 

HE chief defect of modern educational methods 
is that they are applied from the side of the 
teacher rather than from the side of the stu- 
dent. The primacy of the student consciousness 
is to be assumed in a study of the problems of 
education. Methods avail little where this consciousness is 
wanting or where it is but imperfectly aroused. It was a 
principle of Abelard, the great mediaeval master and the 
founder of the concept doctrine of ideas, that the mind must 
be awakened before it can be taught. How much, then, the 
student becomes his own teacher is seen in the light of this 
doctrine. He must put himself in the way of being taught. 

A popular illustration of the philosophy of teaching is thus 
made: On that table lies a book; in this chair sits a 
boy. The work now is to get that book into this boy's head. 
The proposition should be reversed and intensified. The true 
work must be to get the whole boy into the book. Until this 
is done there can be no true mastery of a book. The reverse 
of this method may encyst the book in the youthful brain, 
but of assimilation there will be little. 

The receiving power of the student measures vastly more 
than the imparting power of the teacher, though both must 
be normally developed to obtain ideal results. There are mul- 
titudes of well-drilled teachers, but there are few students 
properly aroused to their work. Education is too artificial. 
It is too little of the passion and soul of life. It is not 
enough identified with the All — 



The last of life for which the first was made. 5 ' 



This does not disparage the work of the teacher, even that 



p LIFE AT ITS BEST. 

of the pedagogue, who wisely makes the most out of all but 
hopeless conditions by applying a method of his own. 

Teaching is at once the highest and most necessary func- 
tion of society. The teacher dedicated to his calling is worthy 
of all honor. He is the true potentate, and his rule can have 
no end. In the greater matters of truth the world has already 
acknowledged its masters. Other teachers it will not have. 
These had their seats in Jerusalem, in Athens, in Rome. They 
gave to men their lessons in faith, in culture, in law. Both 
they and their lessons abide. 

But the student sense remains sovereign and each soul that 
comes to learn must approach the seats of the mighty in the 
same full sense of selfhood with which these mighty came 
at first to make themselves masters. Each must furnish both 
the reason and the response that have made the house of the 
world's learning. Those who get their learning from books 
must be in themselves as were those who got their learning 
without books. The book is the incident; the conscious stu- 
dent is the central, enduring fact. 

I do not propose here even a brief scheme of the philosophy 
of teaching. My task concerns the larger and less understood 
matter of the student's relation to both himself and his teach- 
er. The audience which I suppose is made up largely of those 
who have no teachers or who must select their literary 
guides either from among the spirits that live in the books or 
from among those unprofessional people whose joy it is to 
help those less fortunately placed. 

A teacher is necessary. The "self-taught man" or the "self- 
made man," of whom we hear not a little, is a myth. Every 
one who has learned letters or attained to any degree of 
knowledge has been taught by some master, either in the body 
or out of it. Spiritism is fully believable if confined to the 
realm of books. The spirits that dress in vellum and buck- 
ram answer to the slightest "table rapping." The professor 
is but a medium or a go-between. He might be more, but the 
rule is that he is not. When the student cannot find or af- 
ford a professor, why, then, he must be the medium himself. 
Where the efforts of the so-called "self-taught" man exhibit 



HOW SHALL I BE TAUGHT? 73 

unusual results, they are to be attributed chiefly to this double 
sense of responsibility — the sense of the student and the teach- 
er in one. But that teacher, it must not be forgotten, is in 
nature and the books. 

Perhaps the best use of a teacher to the awakened mind is 
a standard to measure itself by. This measure-taking often 
becomes incentive and inspiration. Candle lighteth candle ; 
knowledge enkindles knowledge, and, what is better, soul in- 
spires soul. The spectacle of the pupil becoming the master 
is a familiar one. Aristotle, to whom modern learning owes 
so much, was the pupil of Plato; but went even beyond his 
great master in a certain philosophic insight and founded, as 
against the inductive methods of the latter, the school of 
logic which exists to-day. Great intellectual achievement— 
indeed, any such achievement worthy the name — is possible 
only where the student is intellectually alive and moves from 
himself outwardly. The student's attainments — and by that 
I mean all that is implied by the word "culture" — are not 
limited by either the plans or the knowledge of the teacher. 
This is true whether the teacher be in or out of the books. 

Let the true end of being taught be kept always before the 
mind. That end is to be sought always in life itself, not in 
any of its accidents or accessories. It is the man and not the 
artist, the mechanic, or the agriculturalist, that is the objective 
of education. "Man," says Goethe, "exists !or culture, not for 
what he can accomplish, but for what can be accomplished in 
him." In the accomplishment of his own culture each man is 
the largest factor. In that sense truly he is "self-made ;" but 
it is an honor which is shared by all. 

The first condition of being well taught is to be able "to 
distinguish one's self from all external things and these from 
one another." This is personality. It is the need of the child, 
the youth, the man. It is worth while to emphasize this 
Until the mind gets hold of itself, being taught is but a me- 
chanical process. When all the consciousness and personalis 
are on the part of the teacher, it is as though a man worked 
the handle of a dry pump. That pump is the unaroused im- 
personal student. 



74 LIFE AT ITS BEST. 

Each day the student must be able to say with increased 
consciousness and personality, "This is I." But this is in- 
finitely removed from reprehensible egotism. It is the solemi 
self-confirmation of the soul which has come to know itself 

"Part and proportion of one wondrous whole." 

"To be wise," declares Froebel, "is the highest aim of man.' 
About this there can be no controversy; for though it ma) 
be the least-indulged desire of humanity, it as at last the mosi 
intense. It is a passion which results from the healthy blend- 
ing of all the others, the highest expression of the awakened 
life. 

Culture, education, learning — whatever we may be minded 
to call that highest result of self-activity — is the development 
of the whole human being, body, mind, and soul. The stu- 
dent must understand this. Life at its best is everything in 
life at its best. Let it be everything of each particular life at 
its best, for each one's task is with such equipment as is pro- 
vided him. The ideal may well be discounted, but no arbi- 
trary limit is to be set. Dare to hope, nor hesitate to aspire. 

For reaching the mind's highest prophecy there need be no 
vexing rules. Intellect is its own rule. The eagle has no 
path. Education, according to nature, is the normal rote for 
those alive in heart and brain. Call daily to your every con- 
scious power and lay hands on that part of life which obeys 
the summons. 

It is worth while to consider as an analogue in this con- 
nection how certain plants have been forced into what appear 
to be new types, almost realizing the monistic dream of trans- 
muted species. Seedless fruits, spineless cacti, and the like 
attest the all but miracle-working power of science. The law 
is a simple one, though. The strongest tendencies in the plant 
(and these are always toward benignity, as nature is) are in- 
tensified through a series of experiments, with beneficent re- 
sults. In like manner the best tendencies of life are to be in- 
tensified. Through this process is to come the perfect human 
type, the sage and the saint in one. 

The teacher serves his largest office in arousing his pupil's 



HOW SHALL I BE TAUGHT? 75 

intellectual consciousness. He must be the voice of one cry- 
ing in the wilderness. Here his work is dynamical; but for 
the rest it is companionship with those whom he teaches. He 
saves the willing student from desultoriness both in effort and 
in choice of books. 

True teaching is only leading, though a true studentship is 
not always following. The things called curricula in our 
schools and colleges are sometimes stumbling-blocks, some- 
times Chinese walls, in the way of a true intellectual ambition 
in the student. Exceptions they may be, but the cases are 
concrete in the memory of those who have seen the helpless- 
ness of many a college graduate when turned out upon the 
world. A way around the obstruction may eventually be 
found in the growing electicism of our school courses. 

The liberty to follow their spontaneous intellectual impulses 
accounts for the surprise so often furnished in the cases of 
self-taught students. In these cases the teachers followed in 
the books are infallible leaders. Why might not the professor 
of flesh and blood be such a leader? He might if he could 
first arouse the student intellect so as to see the manner 
and spirit of it. 

The teacher should move only so far ahead of his pupil as 
is necessary to lead him in the direction which nature indi- 
cates. In that case he becomes the pioneer of a coming oc- 
cupation; and the pupil, following, conquers in his own right. 
Let the pupil understand that in that way only can he inherit. 

It will naturally be objected that the teacher in our modern 
schools has no time for such attention to individual pupils. 
True it is, and all the worse for our modern schools, and how 
calamitous for the modern pupil! Let every boy who can do 
so get at least a part of his training under a tutor, one with 
a soul and a brain well balanced. In the absence of ability to 
retain a tutor, employ yourself. It is a luxury you can always 
afford. 

This exhortation applies especially to those who either have 
had no college training or whose college experience has left 
them lacking in the essentials. The graduate is too often 
tempted to lay down the work of self-culture at the point 



j6 LIFE AT ITS BEST. 

where it should begin. In fact, self-culture (if we must still 
use that term) comes properly after the college course. Then 
it is that this regimen of developing personality through an 
enlarged consciousness becomes possible on a vast scale. 

The curricula of the colleges are not to be undervalued, 
nor are college discipline and healthy college sports, or indeed 
of schools of lower grade, to be decried. It is professionalism 
in both education and athletics that is confusing. Let every 
youth sacrifice to the uttermost to obtain a college training. 
Nothing can compensate the lack of this training. But let not 
those to whom the college course is impossible despair. There 
is a way. Whosoever is willing to be taught may find his 
teachers, and those both capable of talent and generous of 
time. 

A very careful interpreter of Froebel and Pestalozzi says: 
"As that which is exercised grows constantly capable of 
higher and more varied activity, so must the exercise grow 
continuously higher and more varied in character." The mind 
must have a fresh incentive each day. One study leads to an- 
other as naturally as the growing body calls for increased 
sustenance. The ability to read is the key which unlocks 
every door of knowledge possible to be entered by the reader. 

A somewhat popular current description of an educated 
man is "one who can do things." The conceit is fallacious. 
It puts the effect for the cause. Feeling and thinking are the 
end of education. Knowledge which results from conscious 
thought and feeling is behind action. The educated man is 
the one whose emotional and intellectual powers have been 
brought to a balance in the perfect development of each. This 
man can do things, undoubtedly; but not every one who can 
do many very useful and helpful things is this man. 

Training for particular professions or callings in life may 
be a part of education, but it is certainly not the essential part. 
The parents who seek to educate their son that he may "get 
on in life" have missed the meaning of both education and 
life. The first thing to do is to make a man by arousing the 
life and clothing it upon. After that, let the man do as oc- 
casion serves. Manual and professional training is not to 



HOW SHALL I BE TAUGHT? 77 

be decried; but it should not displace the first great ideal of 
education — that of making a thinking, feeling soul. The pro- 
fessional should be grafted on to the man. He will be but 
an indifferent professional who is not first a man. 

The manual education of boys and youth in the present 
state of society is to be approved. It is a blessing where the 
larger education cannot be gained. But, like many other 
things whose merits are in the necessities of the cases they 
serve, it is an expedient. Whose prerogative is it to make a 
bricklayer or a blacksmith of one whom Heaven has ordained 
to be a prophet, a philosopher, or a leader of men ? The youth 
should have a chance to prove whose he is. He should have 
this chance even where the manual course becomes his means 
of support. Let him first give answer. 

"Great offices will have great talents. 
God gives every man 
That virtue, temper, understanding, taste 
That lifts him into life and lets him fall 
Just in the niche he was ordained to fill." 

Let the youth in every state seek and find his chance. Let 
him show by the manifestation of the self from within whence 
he is and to what end he is sent. Fondness and ambitious 
dreamings are not to the point. Life consciousness and pur- 
pose must emerge. It was not the Bethel dream of the patri- 
arch that made his after years illustrious, but the stirred 
life evidenced by the altar and the vow which followed. The 
dream had its place, and the life without dreams is but a me- 
chanical thing, for it must lack the measure of the ideal. 

Do you ask how you are to accomplish self-arousement? 
How you are to begin to make your life large and great and 
useful, and therefore happy? Concentrate your powers of 
thought and feeling on yourself; think of your absolute sep- 
arateness from everything else, on the one hand, and yet of 
your kinship with the universe on the other; fill your lungs 
with fresh, vital air, and steep your brain in the vision of the 
world. Spend a frequent hour in meditation ; look long and 



7S LIFE AT ITS BEST. 

thoughtfully at the stars. Fix yourself in the study of one 
great book until you have mastered it. Above all, remain 
long and earnestly at your prayers, and submit your mind, as 
your heart, to your Father which is in secret, and he will re- 
ward you openly. 

"And thou shalt come, 
And He will foster thee, 
And satisfy thy soul; and thou shalt warm 
Thy trembling life beneath the smile of God." 



THE USE OF BOOKS. 



Golden volumes ! Richest treasures, 
Objects of delicious pleasures! 
You my eyes rejoicing please, 
You my hands in rapture seize ! 
Brilliant wits and musing sages, 
Lights who beam through many ages, 
Left to your conscious leaves their story, 
And dare to trust you with their glory. 

Dear volumes! You have not deceived! 

— Isaac Disraeli 




CHAPTER VIII. 

THE USE OF BOOKS. 

JOOKS have become a race within our race. The 
time when men were without books was most 
remote. History and literature came in to- 
gether. The absence of any form of writing is 
to our civilized minds the equivalent of blank 
barbarism, while on the other hand civilization to us means 
the possession and the wise use of books. 

Fellowship with books is a thing to be cultivated as the 
largest means of bringing life to its best. One should go to 
the reading of books deliberately, enthusiastically, and as a 
life commitment. The pleasures flowing from it are perennial 
and the advantages to be derived from it continue with one's 
years. 

The question most commonly asked by the intellectually 
inquisitive, both young and old, is : "What shall I read ?" It 
is not the inquiry first in order nor the one of chief impor- 
tance. A broader concern relates to the end of reading — 
the why. This reason makes a part of that doctrine of the 
aroused consciousness which is the spring of the highest and 
best in effort and attainment. It should have the emphasis 
of this whole question of literature. 

Much labor has been expended by the generous-minded in 
making lists of proper books to be read by those without 
teachers or guides. But to the reader who has not settled the 
fundamental question of "Why should I read?" these lists 
will be almost certainly a multiplication of his difficulties. It 
is one book — and not even a small library — that he needs to 
be pointed to. That book is himself and the needs, crucial 
and life-involving, written therein. But who shall open to 
him that cryptic book? Who shall interpret it? We trust 
to be able to afford a little help. 
6 



82 LIFE AT ITS BEST. 

Perhaps the surest way to help to a proper understanding 
of the use of books is to get a correct view of what in the 
best and truest sense constitutes a book. Books in this sense 
are the answers of ourselves, our needs, our slumbering 
powers and hopes. 

John Ruskin, who was an oracle with English and Ameri- 
can readers of the last generation, and who is entitled to 
speak with authority to the men and women of to-day, says 
that the author of a book "has something to say which he 
perceives to be true and useful or helpfully beautiful. So 
far as he knows, no one has said it; so far as he knows, no 
one else could have said it. He is bound to say it. Clearly 
and melodiously, if he may, clearly at all events. In the 
sum of his life he finds this to be the thing, or group of things, 
manifest to him. ... He would fain set it down forever, 
engrave it on a rock, if he could, saying: This is the best of 
me. . . . This I saw and knew/ That is his 'writing' or 
scripture. That is a 'Book/ " 

But there are books and books, and therein is the difficulty, 
the peril. The active consciousness must be in the reader. 
With the inner light he can hardly fail to stumble upon the 
book — if not the one of prime appositeness, then the one 
which will illuminate and inspire. If there should seem to 
be any difficulty in what has been said, any appearance of 
overstraining, it is enough to say that the outward sign of 
this inner light is an honest hunger, a willingness to be helped, 
and a purpose to give in only to the best. Any soul truly 
alive can quickly get itself the mastery at these points. 

The largest use of books may be set forth thus : First, to 
complete the awakening and equipment of one's own powers; 
and, secondly, to gain a parity with those about us who are 
advanced in knowledge, that we may cooperate with them in 
great thinking and endeavor; and also to secure such su- 
periority over the "ill-guided and illiterate" as will enable 
us to lead and help them. Ambition within these bounds is 
absolutely without reproach or inhibition. 

A refined and cultured taste comes of the happy use of 
books. Traditionary thought helps to the wise ordering of 



THE USE OF BOOKS. 83 

the emotions and sensibilities. It also brings to the discipline 
of each and every impulse of the mind those tests which de- 
termined the course of the reverent and teachable of all the 
past. To carry such a taste into the activities and service of 
life is to go with the assurance of recognition beforehand. 
It is also to go with a reasonable hope of being one's self 
a creator of ideals, and it may be a master after the manner 
of those who meet us in the books. 

Culture is the strongest help to religious attainment. "Cul- 
ture and religion" is a phrase which properly relates the 
highest results of living. Sanctified knowledge is the foun- 
dation of the experiences of religion. Ignorance or even the 
lack of healthy culture is the bane of religious life. It is 
a source of sordidness, and hence a hindrance to religious 
progress. It makes impossible a true understanding of the 
evangel and the spirit of the Christ. This is not to say that 
many unlettered people are not loftily spiritual, but they have 
become such in spite of their lack, and their power of service 
has been circumscribed by their intellectual limitations. A 
specious culture is inimical to piety, but we speak not of this 
Only that is true which is a gift of Truth to her faithful chil- 
dren. 

"Let knowledge grow from more to more, 

But more of reverence in us dwell ; 

That mind and soul, according well, 
May make one music as before, 
But vaster." 

It must be remembered that books start us off where those 
of past ages stopped. We have in books, together with whal 
our heredity advantages us, so much the start of the genera- 
tions behind us. But for our books we must needs begin 
in the wilderness and turn again to the development of first 
principles. Must not every one, then, who fails of his in- 
heritance in the books see that but for the bounty and in- 
dustry of his fellows about him he would inevitably re- 
vert to the helplessness of primitive life? It is a common 
saying that a few think for the whole body. It is truth, and 



8 .} LIFE AT ITS BEST. 

by that token a few make use of the books to the measurable 
advantage of all. Is not society, in fact, a household whose 
nursery overflows with the intellectually helpless for whom 
the few strong must read and think as do the nurses for their 
wards ? 

The absolute present need of life is answered in the books 
With this knowledge, which should in some way become the 
property of the simplest minds, does it not seem impossible 
that the needed book should not be sought, found, and its 
lesson learned with diligence and zeal? Let us take the 
science of common things, especially that which relates to the 
body and to homely hygiene. The laws of health and life 
of which it treats are easily learned and easily obeyed ; more- 
over, they are to be found set forth in books so inexpensive 
as to seem without price and so simple that he that runneth 
may read. 

The use of books of history is a definite objective to the 
reader with a purpose. History is the touchstone of the 
larger sense and the deeper emotions of life. What life ha? 
been life may be, and more. It is especially the office of his- 
tory to minister this consciousness. 

The reason of this use of history is plain. History takes 
into account the weight of each unit in world action. There 
is no history without this; a romance there may be, but not 
a record. When all biographies are blended into an in- 
telligible whole, the result is history, a biography of the 
greater man. Such a record of life is a tree whose leaves 
are for the healing of the nations that read. 

Professor Green in writing a history of the English people 
more truly expounded the philosophy of history than did 
Henry Thomas Buckle in his ponderous volumes of history 
written from the philosopher's standpoint. Stories of bat- 
tles, catalogues of armies, and narratives of the exclusive 
doings of kings may be dramas — often melodramas — within 
the drama of history; but only the results of the lives of 
men and women in every walk and office of the nations can 
be accepted as the true matter of history. Herein is the 
value of that so potent literature. 



THE USE OF BOOKS. 85 

To read history effectively one must find the biographical 
leadings. That is the thread of Ariadne. It brings the 
reader into the clear light of outer day. To follow the tracks 
of kings and their puppet courts and armies is to tread the 
path of fable, albeit tragic and bloody fable. To follow the 
footsteps of men — the people — is to walk the highway of true 
history. To seek for the man in the chaos of the ages is to 
seek for understanding and to show a sane and sufficient 
reason for inquiry. The true meaning of life is seen at its 
end, and that is the point from which history is both written 
and read. That end is every day. 

It seems almost trite to even attempt to point a moral on 
the use of poetry, that earliest and fullest voice of the race. 
It is the medium of the truest worship, the companion and 
excitant of the deepest and most fruitful contemplations. Not 
only have great souls uttered themselves in poetry, but souls 
have been made great in the use of it. God made his prophets 
poets, and the prophecy which is unto life has been freely 
quaffed from the rivers of song. 

Periodically a voice is uttered to announce the end of 
poetry. But the number of those who are willing to for- 
swear all that they may make themselves priests and vestals 
in the house of song is not diminished, and the censers of old 
burn still in the newer temples. The life that passes by the 
enchanted places of poesy slights the pledges of beauty, power, 
and prophecy. 

"Poetry," says Cousin, "is the first of the arts, because it 
best represents the infinite." The reason for making a 
specialty of reading the best poetry could not be better stated. 
Poetry lifts the veil from the mysteries of life and brings the 
commonplaces of our visions and experiences back to their 
true relations with beauty and truth. 

*In the use of the word "reading" I desire to be understood 
always as meaning "study," so far as that may be possible to 
the reader. No reading to become effective needs more to 
pass into the fact of study than does that which is done in 
poetry. The superficial reading of this day explains the so- 
called "decay of poetry." When we have a generation of 



86 LIFE AT ITS BEST. 

thoughtful readers, then shall we have a revival of the taste 
for the works of the great masters of verse. A land without 
poets or poetry is a land without patriots or a national senti- 
ment. 

"What does poetry — the poetry of Milton, for instance — 
prove?" asks one. Nothing that you can measure or assay, 
perhaps. But is it not to be reckoned the highest and truest 
logic if it be found to prove the mystery, passion, and in- 
satiable hunger of the soul of which it has ever seemed the 
native and appropriate voice? Is not the fact that it pleases, 
angers, soothes, and disturbs us by turns as we read a suf- 
ficient reason for resorting to it day by day? The great 
poets remain forever; and while the warriors and potentates 
of their times are impotent in oblivion, they still have power 
to dispense gifts to men. The poet soul is supreme. 

"No sword 
Was by her right arm whirled, 
But one poor poet's scroll, and with his word 
She shook the world." 

If the why of reading is of first moment as making books 
to be of a real and productive use to us, the how must have 
attention as a rule by which to make actual what is possible 
to us. Thousands are shut up to their own efforts in gaining 
an education and the larger culture. Even where a liberal 
training has been enjoyed the continued fellowship with books 
necessary to attain this culture has often failed through lack 
of knowing how to choose and use them. I undertake to 
suggest how a reader of even limited attainments may accom 
plish a respectable degree of self-culture in literature. 

I say a respectable degree, for it is worth while to repeat 
that nothing can ever quite supply the lack of a genuine col- 
lege or university training. But after all has been done and 
suffered a multitude of aspiring youth will fail of attaining the 
feet of a master. Many would willingly die the death of 
"Gordie Hoo" only to have some idolized old Domsie say of 
him : "I knew it ! he's a Latin, and he'll win the Greek too." 
But there are things that even death cannot buy. Yet to life 



THE USE OF BOOKS. 87 

with ignorance no soul is doomed without its own consent 
Culture, light, and empowerment are possible to every one 
who will claim them as his heritage. 

Even the fourth grade reader in the common school may be 
made the starting point of a conquest of literature. Who 
does not remember the abbreviated masterpieces of the old- 
time school readers? "The Death of Little Nell," fragments 
of "Rasselas," "Shylock," "The Prisoner of Chillon," "The 
Death of Marmion," and much else gave a view of the field of 
literature. The home student who has this much is fairly 
started. This reader, with the dictionary, is the golden 
milestone of the forum. Let this school reader suggest the 
books to be slowly gathered into a library. With your school 
reader and dictionary, the Bible, a copy of Shakespeare, Keats, 
or Tennyson, Green's "History of the English People," a 
choice two or three American volumes (of which one at least 
should be fiction), a high-class magazine or two, with of 
course your daily or weekly newspaper, you have, with what- 
ever else falls to you of course, enough for one year's read- 
ing. Of Shakespeare you need read no more than one or two 
plays, but read them many times over. Of your poets read 
as you have time, and let that time be of your best hours. 
Your Bible read daily, first devotionally, and then for the 
sake of its transcendent literature. Doing this for your first 
year you will see your way for the next year and for all 
years thereafter. Only read — not overmuch, but wisely and 
with soulful purpose. 

Enter of a resolute will into the thoughts of the books you 
read. Muse until the fire burns; vigil until the mind of the 
maker dawns upon you like the crimson day. Pursue his 
message to its hiding in every sentence, and then insist upon 
a revelation from each word. By this process alone can you 
make yourself a man of letters. 

Take up the hard books; only the hard things are worth 
the while. The clamor for "plain books for plain people, 
easy books for the young" is a clamor for books of nonsense 
for all. Of course it is a question of what you can read; but 
so long as you can carry each word to the dictionary you are 



88 TJFE AT ITS BEST. 

not without hope. Hobbes says: 'There are few who need 
complain of the narrowness of their minds if only they would 
do their best with them." Where others have gone you may 
go. Literature is a kingdom taken only by the courageous. 

The first books read after a habit of careful study has been 
formed are the ones which most effectually and permanently 
influence the mind. A solid classic work read by a young 
man the first summer after his graduation is likely to deter- 
mine the course of his mental future. This chance is all the, 
more important in view of the fact that increasing cares and 
duties continually lessen the opportunity for such reading- 
later on. Now is your time to read a few of the world's 
masterpieces of thought. The time may come when you will 
have little taste and less leisure for the perusal of such litera- 
ture. 

The early reading of any comprehensive treatise will power- 
fully affect the after habits, character, and thought, and noth- 
ing can be of more value to the future student and participant 
in life than some practical views regarding the sciences and 
the higher classic literature. I know a man who, when a 
mere boy, gave much time and enthusiasm to the perusal of a 
book on the formation and classification of clouds. The 
knowledge acquired has given him vast pleasure in mature life. 
The concave of heaven, with its ever-varying successions of 
the hosts of the mists and the clouds, has become to him an 
open book, to be read with daily delight. Leisure reading- 
given to geology or astronomy will return an infinite deal in 
a brief while, and so of botany, chemistry, mineralogy, and the 
lore of insects and bird life ; while familiarity with the classics 
will people nature with myriad meanings and companionships. 

It is criminal to risk anything as to the character of a book, 
especially since the world is rich in classics and voices of 
loftiness and appeal to beauty, truth, and' light. Choose your 
books as you choose your friends. Accept only the best. 

Get into the heart of the books you read. This you can do 
only by getting first into the thought. It is but a step from 
a great thought found in a book to a great soul passion in 
the reader. On such seas the life rides freighted into its 
haven. 



THE USE OF BOOKS. 89 

A word may be said in passing concerning the place of 
those two distinctive agencies of modern civilization — the 
newspaper and the magazine — as sources and means of cul- 
ture, and also of the extent to which they may be used in 
a reading scheme. The discriminating use of the newspaper 
is a necessary part of education. The great world spirit, 
iknowledge of which is a part of true culture, speaks through 
the newspaper. No man can be truly a part of his time 
who does not read the daily press. 

What I mean by a discriminating use of the newspaper is 
the reading of it as a news giver, not as a monger of sensa- 
tions and salacious gossips, as is too often the case. Another 
use of the newspaper is found in the fact that it is an ex- 
ponent of public opinion. In these two offices the newspaper 
is a preeminent organ of civilization and an exceptional means 
of culture. 

The magazine is only an advanced type of the newspaper, 
an evolution of .the daily and weekly. It was found that 
men's maturer thoughts and their demands for the most 
serious forms of literature turned toward the newspaper for 
embodiment and supply. The magazine resulted. While 
filling most important places in meeting the needs of the read- 
ing part of the race, neither the newspaper nor the magazine 
can take the place of books. The dignity, seriousness, and 
enduring quality of a real culture demand such matter as 
only the books can be made to purvey. 



THE MINISTRY OF ART. 



For Art is Nature made by Man 
To Man the interpreter of God. 

—Owen Meredith. 

Around the mighty master came 
The marvels which his pencil wrought, 

Those miracles of power whose fame 
Is wide as human thought. 

— Whittier. 




CHAPTER IX. 

THE MINISTRY OF ART. 

RT is the lasting voice of the higher feelings, 
the ever-repeated echo of what is going on in 
the larger and finer soul of humanity. It is the 
continuously developing ideal of beauty and 
power. It is the perfect image of life. 
Of course I am to be understood as referring to art in its 
restricted and classical sense, to painting, sculpture, music, 
and the literature of the aesthetics. In the study of this art 
there is to be found by even the plainest people enlargement 
of consciousness, empowerment of soul, and the very essence 
of what is commonly described as taste. But it is of the min- 
istry of art to consciousness that the most effective use is to 
be made. If art does not first make us alive in some new 
and true sense, then its ministry of beauty and enlargement 
can never help us. Its preeminent office is to breathe into 
sensuous man the breath that will help to make him a living 
soul. 

Charles Blanc declares that art "purifies people by its mute 
eloquence. The philosopher writes his thoughts for those 
who can think and read. The painter shows his thoughts to 
all who have eyes to see. . . . Who can say of how many 
apparently fugitive impressions a man's morality is composed, 
and upon what depends the gentleness of his manners, the 
correctness of his habits, and the elevation of his thoughts?" 
Art leaves its ministries in the life, but does not label them. 

"What is it but to touch the springs 
Of nature? But to hold a torch up for 
Humanity in Life's large corridor, 
To guide the feet of peasants and of kings ? 
. . . And show the fashion of a kingly man? 



94 LIFE AT ITS BEST. 

To cherish honor and to smite all shame, 
To lend hearts voices and give thoughts a name? 
. . . Art serves Truth, and Truth with Titan blows 
Strikes fearless at all evil that it knows." 

The true artist is as rare as the true poet, and each is rarer 
than either genius or royalty. To the multitude art is only 
something to be looked upon, as the books are things to be 
casually read. The many cannot properly study either one or 
the other. But the burden of these pages is that every one 
look a little longer, a little more soulfully, and that he read 
a little more industriously, a little more deeply. All awaken- 
ing, all victory, all reward are at the end 1 of such a rote. 
Every soul may make much of both books and art — aye, must 
make all that is possible of them, or else be content to count 
for little or nothing amongst those who attain. 

Art has been too often slighted by even that large class who 
possess both the leisure and the means to interpret it. It 
has too often been thought of as a luxury that the rich and 
the socially idle only may indulge, when it should be seen to 
be, what it is — a part of the needed bread of life. 

A picture or a statue is to the sensuous and aesthetic man 
what a book is to the intellectual. The book and the master- 
piece of the pencil or chisel must be studied alike. The crea- 
tions of Correggio, Da Vinci, Titian, and Angelo require as 
much concentration of intellect to understand them — to make 
them a part of one's self — as do the periods of Petrarch, the 
cantos of Dante, the plays of Shakespeare, or the quatrains 
of Tennyson. The three sumptuous color plate volumes of 
Tissot's etchings are as constantly before me in my library 
as is any work of devotion, text-book, or inspirational volume. 
The panorama of New Testament life, and especially the per- 
sonalities of the regeneration, have become vividly realistic 
as a result. The pencil supplies the lack of travel, contact, 
and in material measure that subtle something which the 
printed page cannot convey. These etchings have done more : 
they have moved consciousness upward, as Hermon's wind? 
are wont to swell the waters of Galilee. The net result is a 
higher life mark. 



THE MINISTRY OF ART. 95 

One does not hope to walk through the anthologies of the 
poets as one strolls an afternoon through the park. Days of 
study must be expended upon the harmonies and intricacies oi 
these rhythmic worlds. This begins to be allowed, and as a 
result the works of the great poets are neglected, being too 
royal a fare for the palate of this materialistic age. But the 
careless still think to drink the firmaments of light and color 
from the canvases of the great masters at a glance, or they 
dispose of classic marbles as they would of a well sweep or 
a finger board by the highway — often seeing, what only vul- 
gar eyes can see, a suggestion of fleshliness which is in their 
own minds alone. As human nature is awful and instructive 
of those antithetic thoughts — life and death — whose manifesta- 
tions lie about it, so is art awful and interpretative of life 
and death. Whoever enters its shrine as a true student and 
worshiper will come forth with the sense of both joy and 
fear. 

The utility, as the morality, of art turns wholly upon \U 
faithfulness to itself. A fleshly art is not art at all, as a 
spurious coin is not money, nor hypocrisy religion. Art is the 
echo of the soul when at its best. Mark the phrase so often 
used already — at its best. Art is not a product of perfection 
Human perfection when it comes will need no art; but the 
office of art is to assist toward human perfection, and this it 
does by revealing the consciousness of life, by holding a mir- 
ror before the eyes of the human senses. 

A painting of merit represents a moment in the life of a 
great master of music who, with wondering friends, stood 
thrilled to rapture by his brother artist as he swept the organ 
to the rushes and variations of one of his symphonies. The 
painting corresponds to the history of the emotion. Every 
true work of art has this quality. It catches and gives ex- 
pression to but one, or at most to but a cluster, of the emo- 
tions. To the generations coming after such a work of art 
will be a means of training the soul by awakening identical 
emotions. This is the use of art and this its necessity. All 
life shares in this necessity, and to all life true art has this 
ministry. 

All feeling, as all experience of whatever kind, comes to 



96 LIFE AT ITS BEST. 

men piecemeal. The pulses do not move onward like a river, 
but beat up and down like the tides of the sea. The mind does 
not radiate incessantly like the sun, but emits its light in 
throbbings like the stars. The tense lines in nature cover the 
wholly inert. Whatever is vital is elastic and subject to ir- 
regular movement. The heart is not capable of equal and 
unvarying feeling, nor is the sentient nature adapted to the 
task of carrying an unbroken series of impressions. It is 
unnecessary to inquire why this is so. A sufficient answer is 
that it is the law of kindness which the Infinite has established 
over the finite. If man were capable of a constantly suc- 
ceeding series of equally stirring emotions, one of two things 
would speedily happen : either the sentient fabric would col- 
lapse or the passions and joys of angels would become com- 
monplace with men. 

The thing we call inspiration is the feeling or emotion which 
comes to us when we are brought to realize as possible to us 
something outside of ourselves or above our present attain- 
ments of which we feel the need. This inspiration is abun- 
dantly supplied in books and works of art, and assuredly in 
the lives of the great and good of which books and art are 
only the miniature. Life — joyful, optimistic, useful life — is 
dependent upon these inspirations which, like piers standing in 
the midst of the river or the frith of the sea, serve to support 
the bridge which carries from shore to shore. 

Every student of art — the beginner as well as the most ad- 
vanced — needs to know what we are here endeavoring to 
make plain— namely, that every work of art, the painting, the 
statue, the symphony, and (according to Poe) the poem, catch 
life at the moment. Not a series of effects is attempted, but 
the supreme effect. The lesson offered is the highest for that 
use. The last word is given. There is none other to be ut- 
tered unless a new one be revealed from above. It may take 
days, months, years of study concentrated on painting, statue, 
or poem to discover that last word; but when that is seen, 
the student sees his own soul. Keats has effectively expressed 
this ultimating principle of art in his "Ode on a Grecian 
Urn:" 



THE MINISTRY OF ART. 97 

"Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard 
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on, . . . 
Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave 
Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare. 

Bold Lover, ... 

She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss, 

Forever wilt thou love, and she be fair ! . . . 

'Beauty is truth, truth beauty' — that is all 

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know." 

The revelations in history which have been soul-making 
were sudden, swift, climacteric. A burning bush unconsumed 
suddenly appearing on a mountain side and as suddenly dis- 
appearing, a still small swiftly passing voice in the desert, 
a descending and quickly evanishing dove, the Light suddenly 
bursting on human sight and as suddenly expiring in one 
great flash — these have marked the order of the coming of 
the perfect fullness. In its measure art has manifested a like 
necessity, a like purpose, and those who would be helped even 
a little by its ministry must have respect to this its most 
important secret. 

Everybody cannot be an artist, but everybody can have a 
measure of the artist's soul, without which to him art must 
be as though it were not.- The Swiss goatherd has led his 
flock for forty years in sight of the glories of Mont Blanc, 
the Grand Combin, the Dent Blanche, the Weisshorn, the 
Dom and thousand lesser peaks about, and yet has felt no 
thrill nor any higher motion than that felt by his brother 
goatherd in plains below; but men have walked amid those 
hills, and in the space of brief hours have caught inspiration 
for mighty endeavors and tasks of genius and also for devout 
and thankful living. This is again but a parable of those 
whose lives are open to the ministry of art and those to whom 
it is completely shut out. 

Life is healthy agitation under the spell of feeling and im- 
pression. The soul is built up of emotions, one by one, as a 
temple is built of stones laid one upon another. A public 
teacher used to say that he could divide his intellectual con- 
7 



9^ LIFE AT ITS BEST. 

sciousness into as many stages as he had read and mastered 
great books or studied great works of art. This is both 
logical and psychological. Whatever is in life, except its base 
in consciousness and innate or inherited tendencies, is of 
inspiration which comes directly or indirectly almost wholly 
through the channels of literature and art. 

Art is of nature and necessity the close ally of religion. 
In all ages painting and sculpture have stood close to the 
altar, and to rear a shrine about that altar architecture has 
exhausted its resources. Poetry and music had their rise 
and completed their ideals as liturgies and psalms. To the 
young Christian, therefore, a sympathetic study of art becomes 
not* only a means of aesthetic enlargement but also of balan 
cing his religious feelings. 

Readers of the Church literature of a generation ago will 
remember an unusually helpful book interpreting the mysteries 
of the post-resurrection days of the Christ which grew out 
of a thirty years' study of the Pasce Oves Meas of Raphael. 
At first the painting showed only the well-ordered details of 
a sea beach, a fisher boat, with its bundles of idle tackle, float- 
ing at anchor, the ardent face and earnest pose of the fisher 
apostle, and the complementing figure of the Christ regard- 
ing with questioning air the now humbled disciple. But as 
the days went by to the studious eye of the amateur the pic- 
ture began to speak, mysteries of the hidden and kingly life 
of the risen Christ began to be revealed in the blendings of 
the canvas, the resurrection body began to be discernible, the 
transfiguration of the penitent Peter began to be real, and out 
of the whole burst at length the power of the words : "Thou 
knowest that I love thee!'* 

The ministry of art in promoting religious and moral truth 
is most real. The success of the Church in establishing itself 
in Central and Northern Europe was largely due to the agency 
of art. It is also true that this same art, crystallized in ca- 
thedrals, altar groups, and the like, has done more than the 
authority of popes or councils to hand the traditions of this 
religion down to the present time. What art has done in spite 
of the errors of a misguided Christianity, it doubly does as 
the ally of the enduring truth. 



THE MINISTRY OF ART. 99 

The record of medievalism in its art is far less hurtful 
than in its theology and polity. Art, in fact, is a certain 
form of orthodoxy. The masterpieces which type the spirit of 
Vatican Catholicism are a help to the student in separating 
the orthodox from the heretical. The painters and sculptors 
of the Vatican were the freest and soundest theologians of 
their age. The study of this art, then, becomes both safe 
and necessary to those who would have a large understand- 
ing of the historical spirit of Christianity. It shows how 
the faith of genius fought in that far time with beasts at 
Ephesus. 

While poetry and general literature slept in the age before 
the Protestant Reformation art was active. Indeed, the pencil 
and the chisel served a tenure in the offices of both art and 
poetry. The color harmonies and marbles of the Vatican 
and the Laurentine were preaching a protest against mediaeval - 
ism before Luther and Zwingli had lifted their voices. 

Perhaps few of our young pepole have any number of the 
masterpieces in their reach, and still fewer have a hope of 
seeing the ancient repositories of these treasures; but hand- 
some and correct prints of these are available, and not a few 
helpful books on the same are extant. No time dedicated to 
the perusal of these can be counted as lost. 

In that marvelous treatise, "The Seven Lamps of Archi 
tecture," John Ruskin has interpreted the parables and beati- 
tudes of architecture in a way that has charmed and edified 
two generations of Anglo-Saxons. These conceits of the con- 
noisseur run the gamut of the moral and aesthetic harmonies. 
Old St. Mark becomes thereby forever the shrine preeminent 
of the idealist in architecture. The very stones of that ancient 
pile have been given tongues with which to utter "whatsoever 
things are beautiful." They speak a variable language, but 
their one ministry is to establish the divinity of whatsoever is 
done of man in his aspiring moods. 

But the things taught by St. Mark and the other monuments 
of Italy are also taught by a hundred monuments of ecclesias- 
tical art in other lands. Britain, the countries of the Rhine, 
and even effete Iberia exhibit like parables of might and 



[oo LIFE AT ITS BEST. 

beauty in their sacred edifices, which forever challenge study, 
admonish the moral sense, and exalt the imagination and the 
spiritual perception. 

But one may object that great ignorance and moral degrada- 
tion surge up to the very walls and even under the roofs of 
these creations of ancient half faith, and may therefore deny 
the moral. But Heaven in its own times chose these venerable 
ministers as the temporal means of preserving the claims of 
the gospel from utter elimination from the minds of men, 
and therefore these stones standing one upon the other. 

The cathedral and minster churches of England and the 
continent were the expression of the universal sense of the in- 
finity of faith and the eternity of the worship of God. Deeply 
sunk in superstition were the ages which for the most part 
reared these mighty piles ; but, while the spiritual power was 
well-nigh gone, the moral sense yet remained, for it is always 
true that long after the vitality of personal faith and testi- 
mony is lost the doctrines of the divine immanence and of 
personal and national responsibility in worship remain. The 
ages that thus wrought were devout, and their devotion was 
the working in the midst of many perversities and lapses of 
the leaven of the godward sense. These ancient shrines may 
therefore be understood as embodying the passions and in- 
sistency of a perpetual prayer of forms blindly wrought in 
the dark and ignorantly, yet not all unconsciously, offered — a 
prayer for the infinite mercy, for the infinite protection. ' What 
Schiller expressed in "The Hymn to the Eternal" these master 
builders expressed in the eloquence and rhythm of their stu- 
pendous heaps of voiceful stones : 

"Spare us, O God; we do acknowledge thee." 

And so generation told to generation the longing of desire 
that filled and wrought in the hearts of each, and God fulfilled 
himself from age to age. These monumental piles assert the 
supremacy of the idea of a revelation, the incarnation of the 
highest truth. The towers and clustering spires that rise 
above the naives and maltese aisles of the dim old minsters 
assert no less now than in the time of their lifting the primacy 



THE MINISTRY OF ART. 101 

of the God idea and the preeminence of the tenet of im- 
mortality. The psalms and the homilies of their voiceful stones 
are all to one use and end. The hope of man is not in the 
dust; his true affinities are yonder; and the truth shall abide 
with him and shall be its minister while the earth lasts and 
the stars shine. 



CLOSE TO NATURE. 



I care not, Fortune, what you me deny; 

You cannot rob me of free Nature's grace, 
You cannot shut the windows of the sky 

Through which Aurora shows her brightening face ; 

You cannot bar my constant feet to trace 
The woods and lawns by living streams at eve. 

— Thomson. 

The course of Nature is the art of God. . . . 
'Tis elder Scripture, writ by God's own hand. 

— Young. 




CHAPTER X. 

CLOSE TO NATURE. 

ATURE is more than man's foster mother. In 
a thousand ways she makes known to him her 
maternal passions. Long ago she gave him up 
to be called after the name of the Pharaoh's 
daughter of art; but she still watches from afar, 
and rejoices, though ever so seldom, to take to her own si- 
lences the child of her ancient nursing. 

Life can never come to its best without the sweetening and 
ennobling fellowships of nature. It is not a matter of pure 
airs and healthy lung expansions only, but of something spirit- 
ual — nature-spiritual — which if it be never brought into life 
leaves it like a song which has lost one of its major notes. 

The affinity which children have for the woods — their re- 
sponsiveness to the songs of birds, the sights and sounds of 
the groves — is not of wayward fancy, but of nature. It is 
the answer to nature maternity. It is the recognition of re- 
turn to the native airs and healthy freedom of the race's 
childhood. The inspirations which mature men draw from 
nature are to be referred to this race instinct. Nature and 
man once worshiped together, and had but one voice in praise. 
It ministers to both happiness and loftiness in us when we 
can strike again that nature note and make it harmonize with 
our newer faith. For 

"There is not lost 
One of earth's charms ! upon her bosom yet, 
After the flight of untold centuries, 
The freshness of her far beginning lies, 
And yet shall lie." 

The leadings of nature and the leadings of the divine are 
the two laws of our life to be faithfully and unquestioningly 



io6 LIFE AT ITS BEST. 

obeyed. The revelation in the Book and the revelation in 
Mature accord. Both the law of commandments and the law 
of love have their echo in nature. He who will learn to 
obey the behest of nature will live to taste her best, as he who 
obeys the law of the Spirit shall live to taste eternal com- 
pleteness. 

The baldest vagary of philosophy is the attempt to divide 
the laws of God on the lines of the natural and the super- 
natural. It is our weakness of vision — our limitations in the 
senses — that makes it necessary for us to suppose a natural 
and supernatural law of life. Man needs the nature life as 
he needs the Spirit life. To crush the nature love and nature 
life out of ourselves is a tragedy only second to that of crush- 
ing out the Spirit life. Never can the Spirit life be its truest, 
highest self without the other. When the voices of clouds, of 
skies, of woods, of streams — nature's calls and exhortations — 
reach us no* more, then are we near to perishing. 

"My heart leaps up when I behold 

A rainbow in the sky; 
Soi was it when my life began, 
So is it now I am a man, 
So be it when I shall grow old, 

Or let me die!" 

Only when the nature impulse in man is at its normal can 
the kingdom of heaven do its best in him. Let no one sup- 
pose for a moment that these terms involve the idea of those 
gross and fleshly things that have been too often identified 
with nature. These are the abuses and profanations of nature, 
as fanaticism and superstition are the abuses of the Spirit 
life. 

The proper nature of our bodies is one with the nature of 
woods, of fields, of skies and seasons. The beauty, the order- 
liness, and the healthfulness of these should be duplicated in 
the course of our physical living. Our life was meant to be 
the epitome of this larger nature. We can best become what 
we should be in our bodily selves by getting our thoughts and 



CLOSE TO NATURE. 107 

faith closer to that larger soul of the mother and nourisher 
of our bodies. 

It too often happens, when this matter of living close to. 01 
according to, nature is mentioned, that it is at once supposed 
a regimen of food and outdoor exercise is meant. These arc 
important, but the plea is a higher one. It is that nature— 
both in man and the dumb world — is of God, and that there 
is in man a kinship with every sky patch, every wood- gin 
height, every hedge-born breath, and that he is at his best 
only when he is at one with the ministry of these. The effort 
to interpret this ministry has made poetry, painting, music, 
life. 

It is small grace shown to nature that after despising its 
precepts and declining fellowship with its spirit we should 
paint pictures of landscapes and skies and hang them up in our 
chambers. Surely it is a pharisaism that we should crush 
nature out of our souls and scourge it out of the blood and 
shape of our bodies and then carve statues of to us impossible 
men and set them up in galleries, gardens, and above the 
cobblestones of our streets. Nature will not be appeased with 
Dianas and Cencis in color nor with galleries crowded with 
Apollo Belvideres and Venus de Milos. Life must grow up 
beside nature with the simplicity and sincerity of childhood. 

It is no easier to be natural than it is to be great. In fact, 
it may almost be said that the man we are willing to call great 
is the one who has learned from nature her secrets. Beyond 
any peradventure such a man is the one who has conquered 
the secrets and 1 holds of nature in himself. He has thus com* 
to self-mastery and has prevailed until he recognizes 

"A grandeur in the beating of his heart/' 

"The search for the blue flower" is the study of nature and 
the effort to bring ourselves into harmony with its laws and 
spirit. And truly a lifetime is not enough in which to read out 
even the rudimentary lessons in its book. With the writing 
of these lines there was before me a photograph of a typicai 
Oregon pinery. I have seen the sunset redden on these pines 
grow crimson, and then slowly fade into dusk. The pageant 



10S LIFE AT ITS BEST. 

seemed to mark some opening of eternity, and the distant 
mountains, snow-capped and filleted with fire, seemed seraphim 
standing round about the red portals. A living emotion — a 
part of my higher self — is the memory withal. There was 
immanence there and a revelation, but all the years of life 
could not exhaust the vision. 

The recognition of this soul power in nature is the very 
essence of poetry. Whitman it is who asks : 

"Why are there trees I never walk under but large and me 
lodious thoughts descend upon me? 
I think they hang there winter and summer on those trees 
and always drop fruit as I pass." 

It is not that poetry is an exceptional voice, but that it is a 
natural voice, and the one which man earliest found. It is in 
neglect because nature has been deserted by our generations. 
The smoke of factories, the dust of the streets, and the up- 
towering of brick walls have shut out the sky. We never sec 
the stars. 

We are strangers to the woods ; we have banished ourselves 
from the hills; we do not know "the gospeling glooms" of 
the trees ; we have not yearned for the 

"Friendly, sisterly sweetheart leaves." 

We have not pursued the kindred soul of nature to its 
shrines, crying: 

"O what is it breathes in the air? 
O what is it touches my cheek? 
There's a sense of a presence that lurks in the branches, 
But where? 

Is it far, is it far to seek?" 

The altar and the oracle stood in the beginning times near 
to the secrets of nature. Nor did that relation describe what 
is commonly called nature worship. It described a rever- 
ence for the unseen. The makers of the songs 1 and proverbs 
of the Holy Book were nature lovers. They knew every sound 



CLOSE TO NATURE. 109 

and voice in the woods and amongst the hills, every sweet 
taste of leaf and herb. The walls, and veils of the Temple 
were adorned with traceries of palms and pomegranates. 
King Solomon spoke of trees, from the fir tree that is in Leba- 
non even unto the hyssop that springeth out of the wall; of 
herds, and fowls, and also of creeping things and fishes. 

When the Son of Man came, it was with a nature love strong 
amongst the matching passions of his human soul. The 
mountains and the solitudes were often his companions, and 
the ripening corn, the grasses, the lilies, and the birds were the 
inspirers of his parables. And this was not the eclecticism of 
the wise teacher, but the overflow of that nature beauty and 
power that made so wondrously human him who was so com- 
pletely divine. 

The fact that nature must be studied to be understood and 
to be brought to yield to us its inspirations makes it a book 
of value next to that of the Word divine. The fullest and 
strongest life is the one which exposes itself to the outer 
world. Sunshine and air and nature fellowship give us more 
than light, oxygen, iron, and ethereal fire. They give some- 
thing as subtle as the spirit itself; they do verily give spirit 
and life in the highest sense. 

It requires life, though, to rise to this gift of nature. As a 
picture, a poem, a symphony, or a minister means nothing to 
a moral or an intellectual sloth, so does not a waterfall, a 
sunset, or a sky riotous with the light of differing stars. The 
iloth can never be in apposition to these. The true basis of 
the nature sense is indubitably moral. 

The sources of inspiration in nature are as manifold as are 
its objects. Each one of these addresses some sense of the 
open or willing soul. A pirate was once transformed into a 
man of honor and gentleness by hearing the cooing of doves 
in a lonely place. Dr. Guthrie, the renowned Scotch preacher, 
acknowledged his earliest inspiration as coming from the chirp 
of crickets. Sir John Franklin caught the inspiration which 
made him a great explorer from seeing the whitecaps run up 
the shore of the English Channel. The writer of these lines 
has never lost the inspiration — indefinable, but enduring — which 



no LIFE AT ITS BEST. 

came to him in his fourth year from watching the rain bubbles 
float away on a summer pool. 

The higher effects of nature correspond to our human soul 
nature. Nature has its soul, and that we may annex to our 
own; indeed, we must annex it if we bring to ourselves the 
possession and enjoyment of our best. 

I am concerned that the main thought of this lecture be 
caught. It is that in making and completing our lives we 
must have respect to nature's plan in us. We must save 
ourselves from artificiality; we must discover how to move, 
speak, think, feel — in a word, live — according to the scale in 
which nature has cast us. That scale is infallibly a musical 
one if only we find it and move upon it. Every man's pos- 
sibilities are wrapped up in the degree to which he epitomizes 
nature in himself. It is this that is meant to be promoted 
when we cry out against imitating the mannerisms and idio- 
syncrasies of others. It is to reduce a great rule to a small 
test, to be sure, but it looks in the right direction. Character 
and life action must be genuine and spontaneous. The true 
development of personality involves the rule of being natural 
— that is, being true to that force which is your individual 
share of the great soul of life in the universe of nature. It 
is hard — perhaps it is impossible — to define this sphere of 
individual nature. One must live to know it; one must ex- 
perience it to believe it. Before such an experience comes it 
is but a sentiment, a form of creed that we repeat over with 
those who accept things because they are polite or pleasing. 

Those who talk and affect self and nature wisdom are like 
those who pretend in the aesthetics. One must know in both 
these realms before he inherits. It is not to take nature sec- 
ondhand or from books ; but one must go to nature, must 
hold 

"Communion with her visible forms/' 

and must bring harmony between the nature within and the 
nature without. 

There is an ear in the soul, and that ear must be opened to 
nature; there are eyes of the inward vision, and they must 
be made to see. The power to hear and see is shared with 



CLOSE TO NATURE. m 

man by the soulless creatures. Therein he is not curiously fur- 
nished. Indeed, the wolf and the jackal prick their ears to 
sounds that escape the most practiced ears of woodland 
hunter; but the soul weaves about the human ear a harp 
maze of invisible chords that vibrate to indefinable harmonies 
To have an ear for music — either of organ or viol, or the 
wind and leaf voices or bird carols — is to have a soul capable 
of receiving truth in its sublimated forms. 

One does not need to be musician to have this ear in the 
soul. This listener who knows no chord or key is oftener the 
greater musician. When listening to nature's harmony, it is 
forbidden us to know or even guess the gamut. It is ours 
only to appropriate the accomplished symphony. The use of 
this ministry of nature is to provoke and maintain feeling- 
lofty, soulful feeling — in life. This is the meaning of the gos- 
pel of the senses which calls us to live close to nature. The 
extent to which this call is answered marks the gulfs which 
separate men in the last summaries of life. 

Two men of equal station in life go to hear an orchestra 
or a master of song or a wizard of harmonies. They sit side 
by side. The swell of a conquering voice, the fingers that 
wake the concourses of melody, challenge whatever is pent 
within them. The power which calls to them is spiritual 
The one hears and answers with the unreserved capitulation 
of one who has found the joy and ecstasy for which life was 
made; but to the other the accordant measures, the sonorous 
tones, the infinite spell are meaningless. It is not different 
in fact or degree with those who go to the house of nature. 
The few hear; the many are too dull, too abstracted to receive 
enlargement of consciousness and soul. 

There is something in the order of nature which answers to 
life in its spiritual records. The coming and going of seed- 
time and 1 winter and summer and harvest are a continuous 
revelation of God. Indeed, the year in its unfailing return 
and progress may be denominated a constant Apocalypse. The 
springtime, with its unfolding leaves, is the message to the 
Churches of the firstborn in every land. The summer time, 
with its suns and its glowing, pulsing stars, is the vision of 



H2 LIFE AT ITS BEST. 

the King and the Candlesticks. The autumn, with its blood 
splotches on fields and woods and its roaring winds, is the 
drama of the Seven Vials and the blasts of the Seven Trum- 
pets; while winter, with its black, bleak nights of storm and 
its hoarfrosts at dawn, is the epic of the Rider of the White 
Horse and of the Swordsman of the Black Horse. And built 
on highest mountain summits at last is the city "clear as 
crystal" "descending from God out of heaven." 



THE ALTRUISTIC LIGHT. 



Till each man finds his own in all men's good 
And all men work in noble brotherhood, 
Breaking their mailed fleets and armed towers 
And ruling by obeying nature's powers 

And gathering all the fruits of peace and crowned with all 
its flowers. — Tennyson. 



CHAPTER XL 
THE ALTRUISTIC LIGHT. 




NSELFISHNESS is a constantly misunderstood 
word. As usually employed it describes self- 
abdication and self-abstraction, the thrusting 
out and alienation of consciousness. The word 
H is, however, meant to express the idea of the true 
salvation and enthronement of self. 

Unselfishness is the centering and restoration of ourselves 
in our kind, a willing reincarnation of ourselves in our race. 
It is the finding not only of our happiness in the service of 
others, but it is the finding of the true end of our lives in 
that service. This at first sight appears to be the least hu- 
man thought possible to our humanity; but from the true 
standpoint it is the most human. 

The doctrine of the unity of the human race is not a senti- 
mental one only ; it is the verity upon which rests both philoso- 
phy and religion. The race consciousness is also a profound 
reality, and it is produced by the identical method which the 
individual consciousness follows in becoming altruistic. The 
moving motive behind every unselfish act, every ministry of 
charity is simply and infallibly an effort to produce a race 
soul, a race life, in which each life shall be a pulse beat, each 
soul a point of attained completeness. 

The concrete expression of our love and worship of God 
is the love and help we give our fellow-men. Not that our 
love for God and our love for our kind are to be confused. 
Our love for the Creator and Father stands apart from all 
other emotions ; but the test of it is in the quality of " our 
brotherly kindness, the extent to which we give brother love 
to all human beings within our reach. 

Altruism, which is love and concern for our fellows — lit- 
erally a putting of one's self in the place of another — is to 



n6 LIFE AT ITS BEST. 

our conscious life what music is to the instrument, what 
blossoming and fruitage are to the tree. Unless the tree life 
be abortive or a wild degenerate, there will be fruit. And so 
with life. Unless the healthy vitality of soul be turned aside 
or arrested, an abundant human sympathy will flow out of it, 
like the perfume from the rose or the illumination from the 
candle. It is life. 

For this life — perfectly, serenely human in its large sense — 
the wise and great have longed and hoped. It is man's in- 
humanity to man that has made the divine image so foreign 
to us. It is the reign of the sense of the perfect brotherhood 
that is to keep both our mental and moral skies clear. 

r Ah ! when shall all men's good 
Be each man's rule and universal peace 
Lie like a shaft of light across the land?" 

It is impossible for life to be at its best and not exhibit the 
altruistic light as the luminary ascendant above its other 
powers. It is this thought which appears as the "lamp of 
sacrifice" in Rusikin's "Seven Lamps of Architecture." As it 
is impossible, according to that master, to complete an ideal 
in architecture without the element of sacrifice, without a 
lavish expenditure of that which contradicts utility, so it is 
impossible to build' the perfect frame of life without an al- 
truistic partition of self. 

The "lamp of sacrifice" shows how the line of vision is to 
be shifted from a consideration of mere use to a consideration 
of the ends of the soul life; so that a house) or a temple be- 
comes not only a place in which to live or worship but a 
parable or a symphony for the making and enlargement of 
those who use it, or even those who have only chance of look- 
ing upon it as they pass. It is also what the builder owes to 
himself — his higher self that no wage of money can compen- 
sate — apart from all other ends. And this is the highest 
philosophy of altruism. To be our highest selves we must be 
unselfish and merciful, even to the extent of transferring our 
seff-consciousness over to the ground of another's needs. 

"The great problem," says Auguste Comte, the first of our 



THE ALTRUISTIC LIGHT. 117 

philosophers to employ the term altruism, "is to raise social 
feeling to the position which in the natural condition is held 
by selfish feeling." It ought not to be difficult to grasp the 
meaning of this. It is that our highest purpose should be to 
impart our natural care and concern for ourselves into the 
sphere of the consciousness of others, This is in fact the 
major part of a true education, which consists properly of 
two things — namely, the perfect development of self-conscious- 
ness, and this other, the fitting of ourselves to feel and act in 
the stead of others. 

This altruistic light is vastly more than the giving of alms; 
it is vastly more than the disposition to give alms ; it is more 
than being charitable in either act or thought. It comes of 
the very essence of life; it is the true, the necessary expres- 
sion of that humanity which has come to itself. It is the 
reason in practical religion. "Do for one another all gentle 
acts of kindly courtesy," said Fredrick W. Farrar; "wash one 
another's feet by that best, sweetest, kindliest service of all, 
which is that each should help his friend or brother to draw 
daily a little nearer to God." 

I have incidentally referred to the parable of altruism in 
ideal types of architecture. On this point Ruskin himself 
says of the spirit of sacrifice: "It prompts us to the offering 
of precious things merely because they are precious, not be- 
cause they are useful or necessary." There are named two 
reasons for this : First, the use of self-discipline ; and, second- 
ly, the wish to please another by the costliness of the sacrifice. 

And self-discipline is almost invariably in proportion to the 
extent of the sacrifice. In the building of a house the exercise 
and development of the aesthetic self is in proportion to the 
intelligent expenditure of materials. Where two marbles of 
equal utility are at hand, the more costly — because the more 
instructive, the more illuminating — is taken. Of two metals 
answering like ends, the same choice is made. The spiritual 
life responds in the same way. It is suffering, the ultimate 
of soul sacrifice, that makes perfect, that illuminates to the 
uttermost. 

What from the standpoint of our selfish impulses could be 
less useful or necessary to our happiness than self-denial? 



n8 LIFE AT ITS BEST. 

and yet both experience and the literature of faith teach us 
that this is the path to the truest enlargement of conscious- 
ness and the attainment of the utmost excellence in ideal. To 
live within one's self is to die; but to express one's conscious- 
ness to the outside universe, and especially to pass it over 
into a perpetual sympathy with men, is to live in the highest 
sense. 

"For the man needs must feel 
The joy of that pure principle of love 
So deeply that, unsatisfied with aught 
Less pure and exquisite, he cannot choose, 
But seek for objects of a kindred love 
In fellow-natures and a kindred joy." 

"You Occidentals do not understand Jesus of Nazareth," 
said Chesub Chunder Sen, who visjted this country a quarter 
•of a century ago; "Jesus was an Oriental, and only an Orien- 
tal can interpret him." But Jesus was not an Oriental; he 
belonged to no one age or clime, but to all. He was the uni- 
versal Man, the Man with the perfect sympathy. This was so 
because he carried his consciousness over into humanity and 
,nade himself not only the Type but the Body and Soul of 
humanity. Altruism in us is the persistence of the Incarna- 
tion, the answer of humanity to its higher self. 

Altruism is the prophecy of the higher fellowship of the 
universe, the absolute of the doctrine of the communion of 
the saints. "Some are inclined to think," says Sir Oliver 
Lodge, "that man is solitary in the universe, the Mghest of 
created things; without superior, without equal, without com- 
panionship; alone with his indomitable soul amid scenes of 
unspeakable grandeur and awe; alone with his brethren in a 
universe wherein no* spark of feeling, no gleam of intelligence 
can be aroused by his longings." The lessons of altruism, an 
impulse from without ourselves, point to larger fellowships 
without — above. 

Alms and gifts of charity abstractly considered have no 
merit in themselves. It is an axiom of philosophy that an 
act is in itself without quality. It is good or evil according 



THE ALTRUISTIC LIGHT. 119 

to the motive behind it. But it is difficult to think of any act 
as separated from its proper and efficient motive. Acts of 
charity are therefore accepted, even in the Evangel, as ex- 
pounding the highest quality of altruism, which itself is the 
earthward side of the perfect worship of Jehovah. 

The story of Ben Adhem is for this use perhaps the best 
known as well as the most apt in our uninspired literature. 
On his humble claim of being "one who loved his fellow- 
man," the angel of the record set his name at the head of a 
list of all whom love of God constrained. But in reading 
and interpreting the story this latter thought is often passed 
over or made little of. It was because the sheik possessed 
this larger sense of divine love that the lesser became active 
in him. If we cannot prove that we have love for our neigh- 
bors whom we have seen, what claim can we lay to the affec- 
tion which has its roots in the unseen? 

Altruism is the basis of the only healthy friendship possi- 
ble to us. Friendship without the element of affection is not 
thinkable, and affection must spring out of one of two con- 
siderations — namely, a desire to confer benefit upon that which 
is below us or else to derive benefit from that which is above 
us. In either case it involves the creation of a center of con- 
sciousness without ourselves. Friendship cannot be explained 
by reference to any other motive. A friendship of convenience 
or for commercial advantage is much like marital love sub- 
sisting for the same reasons. It is this thought of the ulti- 
mate value of pure friendship as giving an opportunity for 
the play of self-consciousness outward into the highest and 
holiest relations of sympathy and communion that the death- 
less laureate sings : 

"I hold it true, whate'er befall; 
I feel it, when I sorrow most; 
Tis better to have loved and lost 
Than never to have loved at all." 

Nothing is more certainly indicative of the social and spirit- 
ual progress of our age than the growing use by civic and 
industrial societies of the word "brother." A quarter of a 



i-o . LIFE AT ITS BEST. 

century ago the term was not in use except in the home and 
in certain religious circles. Now one hears it everywhere — 
in the railway carriage, in the steamship, in the great hostel- 
ries, in the workshop, in the salesroom, on the streets. It has 
of course a preponderant cabalistic suggestion, but it is sig- 
nificant of a conscious and purposeful drift in society ; it is 
a sign of the times of prophecy. 

Much has been written in affirmation of the law and obliga- 
tion of brotherhood. The veriest heresies of socialism, as 
well as of religion, take up the cry of "the Fatherhood of God 
and the brotherhood of man." But there is but one ideal of 
brotherhood. It is the Master's ideal, and it makes one of 
the relation of brotherhood in the home and in the world 
without. The realized kingdom of God will not only set men 
in a sentimental relation to one another, but will put all in 
the way of sharing its benefits by reason of the suffrage and 
help of each. 

The secular adoption of the word "brother" is indicative of 
tbe passing away of those artificial distinctions and class titles 
which begot the tyrannies and despotisms of the old times. 
"Primus," "Pontifex," and "lord" are words which, so far as 
they express either spiritual or social superiority, must pass 
away before the conquering vision of the universal brother- 
hood. Distinctions there will always be, and titles and terms 
to fit them withal; but they will be only such as men win for 
themselves on the levels of brotherhood and equality of op- 
portunity. "Brother" is a sound 1 not incongruous in this busy, 
utilitarian age where men contend for mastery through sheer 
force of mental and industrial capabilities. It is, on the con- 
trary, a word most harmonious, most apt, and most fitting. 
Birth and blood weigh little except as they may make them- 
selves an element in the race where the reward is to the swift- 
est and in the contest where victory falls to the strongest. 

The coming of altruism as a social ideal must be through 
the individual. This coming means mutual interest and, there- 
fore, solicitude and helpfulness — the extension of the individ- 
ual sense into the family tie and the family obligation into 
a larger and yet larger affiliation, first to the brotherhood, 
then to the shire, then to the State, and at last to the world. 



THE ALTRUISTIC LIGHT. 121 

The civic use of the word "brother" is the open door for Love, 
the imperial Love of the evangel, to enter into the mastery of 
the universal heart. It is the sign not of the secularizing of 
the Church, but of the evangelizing of the world and all its 
belongings. 

Again I insist that the ultimate aim in all these lectures be 
considered as the one uppermost in the plan of an altruistic 
motive. That aim is to see how our offices to others are but 
services to our own self, our own soul. With Whitman I 
declare : 

"I will not make a poem, nor the least part of a poem, but 

has reference to the Soul, 
Because, having looked at the objects of the universe, I find 
there is no one, nor any particle of one, but has reference 
to the Soul." 

How much, both for ourselves and for those who need us, 
may be made of little things ! Little courtesies are like the 
wavelets on the beach, indicative of the deeper and wider 
movements in the outer seas. They are like the swallows that 
forerun the summer with its cavalcades of singers and its 
cheer of wings in every grove. 

It might naturally be expected that in a lecture like this 
a catalogue of charitable deeds and gifts should be made 
out. It is not that I do not consider these of importance — 
they are important to a high degree — but it is that the spirit — 
the stirred and resuscitated consciousness — is of greater im- 
portance. Too much has been made of the doing and the 
giving in proportion to what has been made of the being. 
My message, as I understand, is largely to the young. The 
burden of my call is therefore to "stir up the gift within you/' 
that the gift may flow forth multiplied. When we love, when 
we have put ourself in another's place, it will be easy to sac- 
rifice. We shall find it our daily bread to do so. 

Let us be careful, therefore, to do and serve, to lend a help- 
ing hand, to treasure the coin separated from selfish use, 
the book and magazine which have helped us, that they may 
go about doing their good to others. Let us visit in self- 



122 LIFE AT ITS BEST. 

sacrificing ministries, in vigils with the sick, in distributings to 
the poor, in the perfect work of discipleship, in those studies 
in sociology, economics, and evangelism which are calculated 
to enlarge our means and offices of brotherhood; but let us 
understand that back of it all must be the altruistic light — 
"the lamp of sacrifice" which is fed from the very soul of 
life. It is this that makes possible 

"The larger heart, the kindlier hand." 



V 



CITIZENSHIP AND PATRIOTISM. 



Man through all ages of revolving time, 
Unchanging man, in ever-varying clime, 
Deems his own land of every land the pride, 
Beloved by Heaven o'er all the world beside ; 
His home the spot of earth supremely blest, 
A dearer, sweeter spot than all the rest. 

— James Montgomery. 

But freedom is our sword and shield. 

— The Marseillaise. 




CHAPTER XII. 

CITIZENSHIP AND PATRIOTISM. 

jITIZENSHIP in a free Christian State is a 
dignity of the first order. It is the evolution and 
embodiment of the best life and manhood of 
history. The exercise of the rights of this 
citizenship is perfectly consonant with the high- 
est and worthiest callings of life. It fits well into the activi- 
ties and attainments of the largest Christian experience. In- 
deed, no view of a perfectly normal and healthy life conscious- 
ness excludes the function and duty of citizenship. 

This citizenship is both an inherited and personally assumed 
©bligation which binds the individual with his fellows under 
the restraints of law and to the ends of building up and main- 
taining both the community body and its inhabiting conscious- 
ness. It was the contemplation of this citizenship in its best 
attained ideal that caused the old Greek master to give thanks 
to the gods that he had been born a Greek and not a Bar- 
barian, the latter word referring to those peoples for whose 
learning and prowess even the Greeks were forced to have re- 
spect. The emancipated mind can be satisfied with only the 
best. 

The true blessedness of life, even the happier uses of faith, 
are dependent in no small degree on birth into happy political 
conditions. Secular life and religion react upon each other. 
A robust type of religion is impossible in a State whose secu- 
lar spirit is squalid; and it is equally true that ideal political 
freedom is impossible in a State whose dominant type of re- 
ligion is narrow and bigoted. 

It is confessedly a trite saying, but one worthy of constant 
repetition, that the State exists in its men of measure — men 
able not only to bear arms but to meet effectively the duties 
of peace and civic quiet. The flower of a nation is its genera- 



i26 LIFE AT ITS BEST. 

tion of healthy youth, ready to ripen into an effective citizen- 
ship — into 

"Men, high-minded men, 
With powers as far above dull brutes endued 

In forest, brake, or den, 
As beast excel cold rocks and brambles rude — 

Men who their duties know, 
But know their rights, and, knowing, dare maintain, 

Prevent the long-aimed blow 
And crush the tyrant while they rend the chain !" 

It must be here laid down that citizenship as a science is 
a cognate branch of education. It should, along with art, law, 
theology, and the professions, become a subject of text-book 
treatment. As an ideal to be measured and aimed at, it should 
be accepted as a distinct content of the perfected life con- 
sciousness. Nothing is more essentially a part of the ideal 
man. 

The State is made up of the units of citizenship, and can 
reach an ideal condition only as each man forms and puts 
into practice a faithful and obedient devotion to justice and 
purity. So long as the exercise of the suffrage is considered 
a thing wholly extraneous to, and independent of, the citizen's 
emotions, private virtue, and religious integrity, so long will 
abuses obtain. When an evil is tolerated 1 in society, the cause 
must be sought not in inherent conditions, either in the thing 
tolerated or in society in the abstract, but in the lack of 
a proper test of citizenship. Vices either legalized or tolerated 
by the State are at last to be laid at the door of offending 
individual citizenship, whether of the few or the many. 

"Vote as you pray" is a specious injunction, because it 
seems to recognize as a fact that a man may do one other- 
wise than as the other. As well say, "Pray as you believe ;" 
for if it be true that a citizen can pray in one spirit and vote 
in another, he reveals his unworthiness to do either. No cen- 
sor, however, is authorized to force praying men into any 
partisan alignment by use of scourge or threat. The same 
high prerogative which puts a man face to face with his Judge 



CITIZENSHIP AND PATRIOTISM. 127 

in the exercise of faith relates him similarly in the exercise 
of the rights of citizenshp. 

It is to be doubted if any large number of those to whom 
have come the blessings of citizenship under such a govern- 
ment as our American republic — not vainly boasted of as the 
best the world ever saw — appreciate truly either its advantages 
or its responsibilities. This admission will explain most, if not 
all, of the difficulties encountered in the administraton of our 
national statutes and local laws; it also explains the abuses 
of elective privileges which the people have inherited as a 
right. In other words, political corruption and the degrada- 
tion of suffrage grow out of a false or insufficient valuation 
placed on the obligations of the citizen. The chief blot on the 
scutcheon is left by the hand of indifference. 

Men must understand that citizenship only creates a larger 
sphere of private action. The casting of a public ballot, the 
influencing, even in the smallest way, of a public policy, are 
acts amenable to private conscience, and that directly. They 
are not less the ground of a private judgment to be passed at 
every tribunal, low or high, to which the individual life is 
amenable. 

Citizenship rightly interpreted is a correlative of manhood. 
The Romans had two words for man — homo, which described 
the physical complement of life, and vir, which described the 
active consciousness, as also the intellectual strength and that 
soul life which uses the body as an instrument. Virtue, 
which with them meant manly strength, courage, and the like, 
was naturally a word brought into close connection with their 
ideal of Roman citizenship. It was a fitting association of 
terms, for 

"In that elder day to be a Roman 
Was greater than a king." 

"His majesty the American gentleman" is a term coined to 
show the overmatching dignity of American citizenship when 
compared with the nobility and heraldries of the Old World. 
It is meant to express that sovereignty of naked manhood 
about which we in the New World have talked so much, but 



i28 LIFE AT ITS BEST. 

of which we have realized all too little. It is, however, that 
ultimate element in our national life toward which we must 
strive or live to see our boasts come to nothing. A republic 
must rest on manhood, and on manhood sufficiently repre- 
sented in its citizens to make a base for its every department 
of administration. If a republic is not so guarded, it inevitably 
becomes a travesty, a despotism in the hands of those who 
are without even the excuse or the responsibility of hereditary 
rulership. "A manhood suffrage" must, therefore, have a 
double significance. It must carry not only the idea of a 
franchise vested in mature men but in those who also em- 
body the best ideals of private honor, courage, and conscious- 
ness of public obligation. 

Of course all this seems speculative in view of the existing 
conditions in even the highest type of Christian State. But it 
is the prevalence of these conditions that makes it worth the 
while to preach the gospel of consciousness in public motive. 
His personal responsibility and participation are precisely 
what it is that entitles every American citizen to be associated 
in thought with terms and relations of royalty. 

While young men are casting about to find whereupon to 
bestow their efforts and studies they must, without reference 
to the professions they have chosen, hear this call to prepara- 
tion for faithful citizenship. A State whose citizenship comes 
to cast a perfunctory, indifferent, or constrained ballot will 
soon have an officiary which will corruptly profit by th ; s 
supineness. And what is worse, an officiary thus returned will 
shortly conspire to enslave its constituency, and will do so 
by methods both unscrupulous and effective. 

But it must not be supposed that the only token or office of 
citizenship is to be found in casting ballots, however honestly 
done, and in administering public affairs, however acceptably. 
The greatest need of our nation, as of all Christian States, is 
for men who think out all public questions, and thus contribute 
to the making of that propulsive and repellant force which 
we call public opinion. It is only as the citizens of a free 
State are brought to think, and that from the deepest con- 



CITIZENSHIP AND PATRIOTISM. 129 

sciousness of personal motive and responsibility, that a "man- 
hood suffrage" takes on its true aspect of nobility. 

We must first have a brotherhood of men before we can 
have the brotherhood of man. Also we must have an ideal 
government of men before we can have 

'The Parliament of man, 

The Federation of the world." 

The citizenship of the great world republic is therefore to be 
created man by man. In this way every State has a State 
within itself — the august and supreme compact of those who 
epitomize in themselves the consciousness of the larger body 
and who think out the problems of its needs and its destiny — 
men who do not 

"Impose for truth and sense 
The pedantry of courts and schools." 

It must already have been felt how all this relates itself 
ultimately to that virtue which we call patriotism. And, in 
fact, there must be at the bottom of citizenship the truest 
quality of patriotism. To whom one country is as another, to 
him no country is dear. One's country should be only the 
enlargement of one's home, and country love at its best is the 
extension of the affections which come into being about the 
domestic altar. 

Love of God and love of country are the fundamentals of 
natural religion. They are the lights which illume the paths 
of both the present and the future world. Citizenship in the 
spiritual city is helped to an argument from faithfulness in 
the citizenship that is below. From this it should be easy to 
infer the importance of incorporating into our life conscious- 
ness the sense and qualities of faithfulness in public rela- 
tions. No man liveth to himself and no man dieth to him- 
self. 

Patriotism is the guarantor of civilization, which is only 
another and secular term descriptive of the sublimation in 
man of that Godlikeness to which the race is constantly at- 
9 



130 LIFE AT ITS BEST. 

taining. It is only as the peoples of the earth are devoted 
to their own countries and are willing to sell their lives for 
the ideals and institutions of their own selection and creation 
that the world can maintain and continue its advance. 

But no man is bound to follow his country when God and 
conscience admonish against it. In that case he becomes not 
only a law to himself, but creates to himself a country within 
his own consciousness. There is true patriotism in the motto, 
"My country: right or wrong, my country;" but it does not 
commit the citizen to the end of sinning by partaking of the 
evil policies of the commonwealth. It goes this far, and not 
farther — namely, that one's native soil is, and should be, to 
him dearest of all that earth can show. It is the potent 
prayer, the slumbering prophecy, that would say: 

"But thou, my country, dream not thou ! 

Wake, and behold how night is done — 
How on thy breast and o'er thy brow 
Bursts the uprising sun!" 

One's country has no right to compel him to violate his 
conscience. It may, and sometimes must, compel him to sub- 
mit to a restriction of the outward exercise and display of 
that conscience. In other words, it may in extremities compel 
a neutrality of action, but it may not force him into active 
war against God and conscience. 

Having said so much on one side, this may be said on the 
other : No man has a right to put his conscience or his in- 
terpretations and conclusions against his country, except in 
the way of expressing through lawful methods and forms his 
dissent or protest. Treason may consist in incendiarisms of 
speech and type as well as in the overt disloyalties of giving 
aid, sympathy, or information to the enemies of one's country. 
Every man should follow the course of his country's fortunes 
with a hearty sympathy; but if he must dissent, it should be 
with moderation of words and the exhibition of an unqualified 
loyalty of heart. 

"But," it is objected, "this gives no room for the heaven- 
allowed and history-vindicated right of revolution. Where 



CITIZENSHIP AND PATRIOTISM. 131 

does that come in?" The right of revolution is so exceptional 
that no formula may be written for it. When the necessity 
for it arises, Heaven usually puts the whole force of it into 
the bosom of one man, who becomes both necessity and destiny 
to the people. Despite the aphorism to the contrary, not a 
few revolutions have had a backward tendency, and it may 
now be seen that patriotic patience and devotion to principle 
in quiet deeds of citizenship had wrought more than force 
and dynamic change have done. 

Both peace and war have their righteous calls from the 
citizen's standpoint ; for being unable to command either peace 
or strife at his single will, he must then answer to that with- 
out him which commands his sense of right. Thus re- 
enforced he is a light in peace and a type of that which is 
made invincible in war. 

"The arm that drives its unbought blows 
With all a patriot's scorn 
Might brain a tyrant with a rose 
Or stab him with a thorn." 

War has been at once the curse and the opportunity of 
civilization. Amazing paradox ! But assuredly the highest 
thought and ideals of Christian citizenship run to the hope, 
the purpose of eliminating war from the plans of Christen- 
dom. It is not believable that every international cause and 
issue might not be peaceably arbitrated, however much one 
believes in big navies and well-drilled battalions as preventives 
of war. 

It is chance oftener than principle that makes strife and 
war possible both within and without States and common- 
wealths; and it is assuredly this chance that oftenest divides 
peoples, making them antithetical to the point of hatred, and 
there is no hate like that by nations nursed. 

"Lands intersected by a narrow frith 
Abhor each other. Mountains interposed 
Make enemies of nations, who had else 
Like kindred drops been mingled into one." 



132 LIFE AT ITS BEST. 

But let it at last be received that the cure of national and 
international ills — the preventive of wars and kindred evils — 
begins in the individual life. We are each his brother's keeper. 
Only a perfected humanity can bring an end of humanity's 
strifes, and this completion is to come one life at a time. Let 
us pray for the last calm of the world's peace and work for 
it in our own hearts and in our own lands — not by loud- 
mouthed cries from the hustings, but through lives that go 
softly and hearts that "do justice, love mercy, and walk 
humbly with God." 



LIBERTY AND LAW. 



We must be free or die who speak the tongue 

That Shakespeare spake; the faith and morals hold 

Which Milton held. In everything we are sprung 
Of earth's first blood, have titles manifold. 

— Wordsworth. 



CHAPTER XIII. 



LIBERTY AND LAW. 




| HE freedom of every man is in the mastery of 
himself. This estate is much the same as that 
which I have been at much pains to describe as 
an awakened life consciousness. But self-mas- 
tery is possible only as the result of obedience 
to those laws which are as necessary to life on one side as 
consciousness is on the other. The plain meaning of this is 
that he only is free who consciously elects to feel, think, and 
act in the truest, highest, and most untrammeled way pos- 
sible to himself. Nor does such a one hold that this deter- 
mination to so feel, think, and act completes his freedom. He 
puts about to discover the laws — which is no more than to 
say the means — by which this is to be done. It is this dis- 
covery that brings life to its best. It is the truest — indeed, 
the only real — success. 

But more than even this determination and the discovery of 
the means to be employed is necessary to make one perfectly 
free. Self-mastery — and therefore the freedom of the in- 
dividual — springs out of a consciousness which, like the sea 
tides, answers a supra-mundane influence. "Hence freedom 
is a genuine option between good and evil, the great option 
by which the habits of the soul are built up. For both time 
and eternity God puts it upon us to attain to victory over 
ourselves." A life which has so attained is in harmony with 
itself — is free. 



'I cannot tell what you and other men 

Think of this life; but for my single self 

I had as lief not be as live to be 
In awe of such a thing as I myself." 



136 LIFE AT ITS BEST. 

The unhappy English bard who voiced both his atheism and 
his melancholy in declaring himself to be 

"Lord of himself, that heritage of woe," 

did but make a glorious mock of the thralldom of doubt and 
vice which bound him and hedged him in, turning his con- 
sciousness into a sea of turgidity and night. But to the man 
made free through choice of the highest it is not so. The 
light without is answered by the light within. 

It would perhaps be difficult to bring together from another 
language two monosyllabic words which mean so much as the 
English words "law" and "life/ Perhaps it would be dif- 
ficult to find two so meaningful words whose relations are as 
little understood. The facts for which they stand are seldom 
thought of as being inseparable. And yet that thought, con- 
ceived and acted upon in some sort, must be the basis of all 
true living. It is indeed the science of life — a science to which 
all who would turn the ore of consciousness into the metal of 
feeling, and this into the coin of thought, must have respect. 

What is this law that is so essential a thing to life? To 
say that it is the ancient commandment is only, it may be, to 
hark in answer back to the question itself. It is the standard, 
the rule, which shuts us up to "that genuine option between 
right and wrong." It is the one way of feeling, thinking, 
acting which is possible to life when life is conscious of itself 
from the crown of its head to the palms of its feet and the 
uttermost tips of its fingers — when there is no dead zone, no 
revolting province in all its realm — when 

"All is concentered in a life intense, 
Where not a beam, nor air, nor leaf is lost 
But hath a part of being." 

In this view law and life are but cause and effect — that is, 
life comes and is completed of law, and can come and be 
completed only in that way. And yet this law is constantly 
treated of as though it were an accident of life, a thing im- 
posed of divine or political caprice. On the other hand, it is 
as often taken for granted that life is competent to originate 



LIBERTY AND LAW. 137 

law, when it can no more do so than it could have originated 
itself. 

Neither can life obey law except as it finds obedience a 
part of itself. Nothing is more important to know than this. 
And the acceptance of this as a doctrine imports no difficulty 
into the problem of obedience. The whole plan of grace is 
built upon it. "As many as received Him, to them gave he 
power to become the sons of God." As easily might one paint 
a Sistine Madonna, carve a Phidian Zeus, or build like 
Brunelleschi without the artist's soul and skill as do "what- 
soever things are true, whatsoever things are lovely," without 
the power of obedience become a part of himself. 

The attainments, successes, and services of men in every 
field of effort are only happy discoveries of the laws within 
and without, which make the attaining and the service pos- 
sible. These laws could not have been something other than 
they are; they must forever remain what they are — the means 
by which the highest good and the highest truth, life's best, 
are reached. 

"Get but the truth once uttered, and 'tis like 
A star newborn that drops into its place, 
And which, once circling in its placid round, 
Not all the tumult of the earth can shake." 

There was never a truer saying in itself than the threadbare 
shibboleth of modern social and political Philistinism, "You 
cannot legislate men into morality or religion;" yet there was 
never one more speciously employed. If you legislate con- 
trary to instinct and life, surely the effort must prove abor- 
tive, however excellent the ends desired to be attained; but if 
the legislation be the discovery of law rather than the making 
of it, you can surely legislate men into the things they are not 
and into the things they do not in their lawless states desire 
to be. The true wisdom of the State is to discover the neces- 
sary laws by which life is moving, or must move, and em- 
phasize these. 

When England said the Stamp Act, though pernicious, must 
be asserted to establish imperial authority, she made a law 
and lost the earliest and richest of her colonies ; but when 



138 LIFE AT ITS BEST. 

she discovered the secret of lawfully making Englishmen of 
the remotest of her dependents, she bound her possessions to 
her by the loyalties of English faith. What is dictated by 
the higher sense as natural and lawful is lawful, and that 
only. Any statute established simply to assert authority is a 
violation of the fundamentals of life, and must inevitably prove 
abortive. It comes of either bigotry or despotism. 

Plutarch relates of Solon that, while he was employed in 
reducing and superseding the Code of Draco, he was asked if 
he thought the Athenians could ever be brought to- obey any 
laws. Solon's reply was to the effect that if laws so natural 
and so just could be given the Athenians that there would 
be no occasion or incentive in justice to break them they 
would be kept. The greatest of the Grecian sages lighted 
(not by accident, for no man ever did) on a great truth in 
that saying. If we discover rather than fabricate our laws, 
and if they be natural, just, and equalizing, as all true obliga- 
tions are, the keeping of them must become in the end a joy. 

Hand-made laws are the genius of evil; those created 1 in 
the order of God's plans are the inspiration of life. No 
science is made, but discovered. Geometry, astronomy, logic, 
jurisprudence are unfolded facts of nature and life that began 
with their beginnings. There are other facts equally great 
not yet revealed. When life and nature come into vital con- 
tact, these will awake. This rule runs through the whole 
order, from the highest to the lowest. There are necessities 
which call for special laws, but God and nature make them; 
make one, man never could, not the least significant. 

The arch social heresy of this age is that there are some 
things fixed by nature and its laws that ought to be changed. 
A familiar instance : Nature makes distinctions between man 
and woman. Society, following the dictates of its benign 
mother, nature, has built up the institutions of the home, the 
Church, and the State on that law; but a school of men (and 
women), wiser than nature, say: "Make a law and change 
this ; wipe out distinctions." 

The race problem is another. Nature draws its lines, not 
always as between inferiority and superiority, but simply of 
difference. A gulf is fixed; but fools say: "Both God and 




LIBERTY AND LAW. 139 

nature are blind; break down the barriers; bridge the gulf. 
Make a law." The dramseller says, although nature slays 
the drunkard and religion curses the drunkard maker and 
society puts a badge of infamy on both, it ought to be right 
for men to debauch at their pleasure, though to their dis- 
honor; and so the State is procured to make lawful a traffic 
which is essentially evil. But nature is the higher court; and 
so, wherever men seek to force conditions by capricious and 
arbitrary statutes, they will find themselves fighting against 
an authority which yields nothing, but compels submission 
at last. 

The power of law is life. It is just and true and good. 
"Ask the laborer in the field, at the forge, or in the mine; 
ask the patient, delicate-fingered artisan, or the strong-armed, 
fiery-hearted worker in bronze and in marble and with the 
colors of light; and none of these who are true workmen will 
ever tell you that they have found the law of heaven an un- 
kind one — that in the sweat of their face they should eat bread 
till they return to the ground — or that they even found it an 
unrewarded obedience, if, indeed, it was rendered faithfully 
to the command." And this is truth to the end of its inditing : 
that law is not something against us, but is in all things the 
way of beauty, love, and life. 

Statutory enactments are often very far from being law in 
the sense we have been considering. Too often they are in 
fact absurd and oppressive. But nearly all statutes are meant 
to limit and not enlighten conduct. In this case they are for 
the criminal class only. The law-abiding soul is free from 
them, being above and beyond penalties. In this his freedom 
counts. 

A pertinent question here is, What is the standard of the 
citizen's liberty? Individual sovereignty is the ideal of all 
government. But men cannot govern or be governed in a 
community and be absolutely free to follow each his own will. 
The public good — both as to morals and material matters — 
requires a partial sacrifice of the independence of the in- 
dividual. But the sovereignty of the individual should always 
be the ideal political freedom. The central government should 
exercise no greater authority than the common peace and order 



140 LIFE AT ITS BEST. 

required; the State or provincial government should pass 
every possible prerogative into the municipality, and the mu- 
nicipality should in its turn use all diligence to defer to the 
individual. 

Every man has the nature right to govern himself. But he 
must use his right diligently, lawfully, or law itself will 
abridge or cancel that right. Here is where all the troubles 
of social administrations come in. The right to govern one's 
self does not imply the right to make laws at one's pleasure 
for that government. It is one thing to be charged with the 
execution of those laws which make and maintain one's per- 
sonal freedom, but quite another thing to suspend or repeal 
these same laws of one's will or caprice. Here it is that 

"Obedience is the bond of rule." 

A study which should command much time and seriousness 
is that which has to do with the means of putting down an 
insinuating social autocracy on the one hand and a rank so- 
cialism on the other. The remedy for both evils is the in- 
dividuation of life under the law of the aroused consciousness 
and the liberated intellect. Whoever obeys in himself finds 
both the authority and the means to bear rule. 

"One equal temper of heroic hearts 
Made weak by time and fate, but 
Strong in will; to strive, to seek to find, 
And not to yield." 

The highest guarantee of liberty and authority in the in- 
dividual is a conscious preparation for, and a manifestation of, 
the power of self-rule. Power is the possibility of service 
both to one's self and to the social body, and service is in its 
turn the seal of power. 

"He hath no power that hath not power to use." 

I will lay down here three rules for the empowerment of 
self, and hence for the liberation of life. . 

i. Self-development. I may seem but to repeat what has 



LIBERTY AND LAW. 141 

been said already in these lectures, but the point of affirmation 
and application has been reached. To be free and great — 
great in self-help and altruistic service— you must find your- 
self in your deepest consciousness; find the sense of life, of 
beauty, and ( of truth that appertains to it; and finding it, you 
must compel it, as the moon compels the tides, to its flood, to 
the submergence complete of life. You must feel, think, act — 
live — in the power of that consciousness. You must bring the 
uttermost of yourself to pass. In study, in effort, in exposing 
your emotions to the influences of nature, art, and to both the 
joys and sorrows of the life about you, you must bring your- 
self to live. This is your preparation. You must elect to 
think of it as such. Do it consciously, do it purposefully, yet 
naturally and in the order of your necessary going and coming. 

2. Self-dedication. Dedicate yourself, thus aroused and 
empowered, not in any nervous or sentimental way, but in a 
way both natural and healthy, to that service and to those 
pursuits w ( hich are nearest at hand or which you judge to be 
yours by special allotment. This is the highest freedom of the 
individual — this privilege of self-dedication to life. 

3. Self-government. The self-governed man has> little or 
no consciousness of the titles and penalties of the secular code; 
nor has he direct interest in them except for his faith in their 
correctness as restraints on the lawless. As for himself, he 
understands that they were neither made for him nor do they 
in any necessary way affect his conduct. He finds a higher 
mandate in himself. "Freedom is not the superficial idea of 
doing what we like, but the power of announcing the highest 
law for our own guidance." 

The perfection of human freedom comes in the coalescence 
of the human and true divine. This is the basis of "the per- 
fect law of liberty," under the force of which the empowered 
life does that which by the test within itself is most apt, most 
true, and most beautiful to be thought upon. 

"More and more in the long and arduous conflict it has be- 
come plain," says Dr. Oman, "that freedom is the fundamental 
spiritual idea, and that even practically it can be maintained 
only as a spiritual idea." It is the Life itself that shall make 
us free. The ultimate problem is "how faith is to be absolute 



i+2 LIFE AT ITS BEST. 

and freedom absolute, yet both one." Over the pleasing path- 
way to this goal is flung the invitation of the long ago : "Come 
and see." 

"Religion, virtue, truth, whate'er we call 
A blessing — Freedom is the pledge of all." 

The slowness of the process by which truth has embodied 
itself in the sciences and faith of the world has been due to 
its conflict with enslaved personality. It has had to wait 
on parties, schools and peoples, and much more on individual 
men. It must move each human consciousness, renew and 
establish each separate life before it can announce the com- 
pletion of its conquests. 

This is the process by which life is to be brought to pos- 
sess itself, though it be Heaven's delay. Napoleon and Alex- 
ander of Russia met in the midst of the river Tilsit, as the 
historian of that time solemnly affirms, to "settle the destinies 
of mankind ;" and the great Hugo said of this same Napoleon : 
"He it was who embarrassed God." And so it has been that 
Pilate, Napoleon, and the rest have judged and retarded the 
truth ; but it goes on unto this last, that life is master of life 
and truth in its turn is master of all. Truth is Life. 

"None ever yet made haste enough to live." 



ETERNITY IN THE HEART 






'Tis the divinity that stirs within us; 

'Tis heaven itself that points out an hereafter 

And indicates eternity to man. —Addison. 

The hero is the world man, in whose heart 
One passion stands for all, the most indulged. 

— Bailey. 



CHAPTER XIV. 
ETERNITY IN THE HEART. 




HERE is something in human life which has 
never been expressed in the terms of science nor 
mirrored in the records of literature. It is both 
logical and natural to accept the belief that in 
this elusive thing is centered the true meaning 
of life. It is that which stretches into the beyond; that which 
enters the veil. Where all forms of human speech fail, where 
apprehension is balked, there begins the deeper mystery — the 
larger reality — of our human life. 

We are conscious too that this mystery is not something 
remote, to which we have the hope and the pledge of some- 
time attaining, but that it is something which life carries 
within itself — a jewel casket of whose value it is not ignorant, 
but which its own hands do not avail to open. The stamp of 
infinity is on our clay; the memories of the deeps from 
whence we came and the prophecies of the deeps whither we 
go haunt our thoughts and mingle with our emotions. There 
is a life within our life. There is there an affinity for the life 
that is in itself absolute. 

This is what the wise man called "eternity in the heart." 
That life with which we presently reckon and which we pres- 
ently use and enjoy is a thing which we, by force of logic, 
give to the absolute. From a last effort to survey its on- 
reachings we turn, as we withdraw our eyes from the search 
of shoreless seas. 

It is this meaning which we cannot comprehend that gives 
to life its truest meaning. It is that last for which the first 
was made. Those who give no' concern to this embodied es- 
sence of eternity, whose joy and inspiration do not have root 
in it, fail of their life's best; in fact, fail of all. 

I do not care to give a technical name to this ultimate sense 
in life. It needs none. It is deeper than consciousness. It 
10 



146 LIFE AT ITS BEST. 

is that consciousness out of which consciousness conies. It 
is that soul which is the maker of the soul we know. It is 
God dwelling in us — the perpetual persistence of the Incarna- 
tion — the condition of the kingdom of heaven that is build- 
ing within and about us. 

Can this sense of the ultimate and highest in us be culti- 
vated? It can. It is the soil out of which spring the truest 
virtues, the deepest joys of religion, and the holiest affections 
of life. It can be made to appear more and more. As we 
grow by reason of our choices liker to the divine substance 
it is more and more manifest that this is the image into which 
we are to be ultimately changed. 

"Let us not always say : 
'Spite of this flesh to-day 
I strove, made head, gained ground upon the whole!' 
As the bird wings and sings 
Let us cry: 'All good things 
Are ours, nor soul helps flesh more, now, than flesh helps 
soul/ " 

This far light within our lives not only reveals the new, 
true humanity, but it creates a new philosophy, a new litera- 
ture for our study. "There is something wonderfully im- 
pressive in this instinctive retreat in our time upon humanity. 
When human nature is true to itself, there is nothing equal 
to it; there is indeed nothing that will bear comparison with 
it among things that we see. It appeals to sense by its help- 
fulness. Men are needful to men." 

But this helpfulness of life comes of the "eternity" essence 
in the deeper heart. It can be said that it is according to life 
or nature- for men to be noble, generous, unselfish only as we 
know nature and life, our human nature, our human life, to 
be inhabited by this persistence of the eternal. Short of that, 
our life goes back to be ruled by its groveling appetites and 
its brute instincts. 

If we are unable to devise terms by which to define this 
"eternity" sense, it may be that we shall be able in some way 
to determine by what means it has come into life. Too few 



ETERNITY IN THE HEART. 147 

have thought on either this or the other tremendous facts of 
which we are the products. To how few is life either a 
tragedy or a triumph ! So little do these stupendous destinies 
of being appeal ! 

How few have thought on the long descent of our life and 
of the multiplied mysteries and passions that are registered 
in our human bodies ! And yet this is the one study which 
can show us how eternity has come to be incorporated within 
us. No matter what scientific view one takes of the origin 
of life, the result is the same. We see ourselves being made 
into "the image of God," with a continual incorporation of the 
eternal essences into our own. 

Every thoughtful student of history — and especially of its 
archaeological eras — wonders at the long and apparently bar- 
ren ages in which men outwardly showed no sign of progress. 
But the meaning was of the internal life. Eternity has been 
forming itself in the heart of the race. Longevity is the 
perfecter of the inner sense and the eye of insight. Prophecy 
went in the beginning days with gray hairs and venerable 
years. Like the almug shell, humanity has mellowed inward- 
ly with its ages, and all its tones have undertones and all its 
music a music with itself. It is the centuries against the 
hours. 

Those who do not become diligent to know these things 
lose the power to be their best. The modern man who does 
not hold himself consciously the heir of all the ages and who 
does not gather the virtue and force of all the past into 
himself is not the child of his mother age. Separation from 
the soul of the past is separation to death. Consciousness of 
it is life. 

"Help me, as when life begun, 
Rift the hills and roll the waters, flash the lightnings, weign 

the sun — 
O, I see the crescent promise of my spirit hath not set; 
Ancient founts of inspiration well through all my fancy yet." 

The long disciplines of life have been an open door through 
which the eternal sense has come into it. Merlin, the great 



HS LIFE AT ITS BEST. 

mage master, according to the legend, built for Arthur a palace 
at Camelot, the chief wonder of which was fcur cirques of 
marble figures sweeping about it upward. The first cirque 
was of men who fought with beasts and typhons and the 
beasts and typhons overcame the men. In the second cirque 
were effigies of men in the attitudes of combat with the self- 
same beasts and serpents, but the men overcame and trampled 
the beasts and typhons under their feet. The third cirque 
exhibited the figures of men clothed in armor and holding 
each the hilt of his sword. The fourth cirque was of men 
who stood in their naked strength, without armor or sword, 
but on each of whose brows burned a flame and from whose 
shoulders started the wings of cherubim. And crowning the 
palace was a statue of Arthur from whose casque floated the 
wings of the pendragon. The sunlight glancing therefrom 
smote abroad, and everywhere men, seeing it, lifted up their 
voices to thank God they had a king. 

This is the parable of that human life that under the dis- 
cipline of the ages has come up from the unequal combat 
with passions and appetite to wear a flame of eternal burning 
upon its' brow and to have wings start upon its shoulders from 
the divineness within. And high above all — that he may have 
the preeminence — is lifted the form of the Galilean Christ, 
who gives this divineness to men. 

Not only the record of life written in consciousness but 
the joint testimony of nature and the outside universe estab- 
lishes this presence in us of the eternal substance. When 
one carries his living consciousness to a contact with nature 
in the budding time of the year, he instinctively feels that the 
quaking, waking life of tree and plant is a parable of that 
larger and completer life that is his own. This is more than 
fellowship with nature; it is the same use of nature that is 
made of the revelation in prophecy and beatitude — a lesser 
use always, but the same in kind. 

In summer; when motherhood is on the fields and when the 
baby corn ears are drinking a milky sustenance in the pledge 
of coming ripeness, there is to him who sees with the eyes 
of his soul a pledge of the perfection of that life within his 
life. Nor the corn only, but the grass blades and the lilies have 



ETERNITY IN THE HEART. 149 

apocalypses for him. "Consider the lilies how they grow"— 
by what manner so mysterious; how, though they weave not 
nor spin, yet are clothed with samite and beauty, so that no 
king was ever so arrayed. How they grow! A power is 
within, about them, and so they grow ! Who can add to his 
stature one cubit? And yet without plan, without thought, 
the physical frame grows, for a divinity shapes it, compels it. 
The autumn comes, and all is transformed. Another seal 
is broken; another phial is opened. The pageant of a tragic 
beauty is laid across the hills ; the wine of longing is poured 
upon the air. There is a Presence brought consciously near 
us. We fain would believe it to be nature that thus works 
upon us ; but it is rather that divineness within us working 
on nature. 

"A mist on the far horizon, 
The infinite tender sky, 
The rich, gold tint of the cornfields, 
And the wild geest sailing high, 

And all over upland and lowland the charm of the golden-rod. 
Some call it autumn, 
But others call it— God." 

By the seaside one watches while the waves with uplifted 
hands and white faces come streaming in from the outer 
deep. "The sea is his, for he made it," the watching soul in- 
stinctively cries. It is vastness, and the sense of vastness, that 
overwhelm; but the vastness is not of the seas which have 
been compassed, but of that "eternity within" which has never 
been compassed. The longing which springs into the heart 
at the sight of the sea is not of the sea, but of God who 
has made us a habitation of his Spirit. 

The color is not in the rose, but in the sensitive brain of 
the beholder. The music is not in the organ or the violin, 
but in the soul of the master musician and in the souls . of 
those who are wrought upon by his wizard skill. St. John, 
in Patmos, saw the spiritual city descend from God and heard 
the voices of those who sang within. He thought the city 
and the songs to be without him — over against the Mgean 



150 LIFE AT ITS BEST. 

blue — but they were not; they were within the soul of him. 
The pure in heart shall both see and hear, because the divine 
within does both reduplicate and reecho the visions and 
voices of the highest. 

Whoever has found this path of consciousness has a sure 
footing for his life going. He is forging toward his best. It 
was easy for Moses to give up dominion in Egypt, because he 
got a hold upon the eternity pledge within. God gave him 
kingship and dominion in his own life. It was easy for the 
archons to declare that they "sought a city," for its outlines 
glowed through the dawn of their own eternity-mingled con- 
sciousness. They endured, seeing the invisible. 

To live in open knowledge of this secret of "eternity in the 
heart" is to be able to put to silence the whole brood of our 
troublesome doubts, to master our fleshly appetites, and com- 
mand our thoughts into the path of a true progress. Can 
there be any temptation great enough to overcome the man 
who is momentarily conscious of the fact that he is to> abide 
forever? Can he be dishonest, unclean, false, or disloyal? 
"Nobility obliges." This eternal sense is my seal of nobility. 

It was because the Galilean knew himself to be Lord for- 
ever that he was able to put presumption from his lips, am- 
bitions from his heart, and pride from his steps. The divine 
cannot be tempted, nor can the conscious divineness in man 
be seduced to follow fleshly leadings. 

This is "the light which lighteth every man that cometh into 
the world," and which is life to those who follow its leadings. 

The soul which in utter command of itself rises up and 
says, "I shall live; I shall not die," has been helped to the 
discovery of "the secret of the Almighty." It is "the lamp 
of power" in the building of the house of its life. 

A refrain of this eternity sense rings through the evangel. 
"Thou hast the words of eternal life." "This is the true God 
and eternal life." This sense or consciousness made alive is 
that bread of which if a man eat he shall never hunger, and 
in the strength of which he shall go on into the house which 
endures. 

Is not this eternity sense the very corollary of love? Could 
there be love without it? "Man counts to man more than all 



ETERNITY IN THE HEART. 151 

else because of love. Every successive generation of lovers 
hallows anew this weary world/' Truly 

"The light of a whole life dies 
When its love is done." 

It becomes plain enough why the very name of Jehovah 
should at last be — Love. It is equally plain why love is the 
high note of the evangel. It is equally plain that love is that 
thing within us that becomes eternal. 

Science knows little about divine love; it also knows 
little about salvation. But its theory of both is that care 
for the whole which sacrifices the individual. Its salva- 
tion is of the race after long ages and the loss of multitudi- 
nous lives. It sees nature careful of the type, but careless 
of the units. But I am one of the units; I am a member of 
the race. I want to be saved; I cannot hear to being lost. 
I cry out for life everlasting. I am in despair if I have no 
certain promise to that end to rest on. I cannot consent to 
die, and I reject every theory which, in forecasting "the great- 
est good to the greatest number," leaves me out. Lord, I will 
not let thee go! Sweet Light, I will not think that thou may- 
est fade from my vision and leave me only the night ! The 
gospel is my answer : "It is not the will of your Father which 
is in heaven, that one of these little ones should perish." The 
universe centers in every living soul. The gospel begins with 
the one removed to the point of being "the uttermost." 

""Shall we live again, beloved?" asked the death-devoted 
Greek. "I have asked that question of the seas, the stars, and 
of eves and dawns, and there is no answer; but when I look 
into thine eyes, I have the answer. We shall meet again. 
Thy love is that which cannot die." Do not all things tender, 
true, divine get their relevancy from that "eternity which is 
in the heart?" Else 

"Why put the lily in the cold dead hand?" 

Sorrow's very self returns to it. The weeping harpstring 
is the sweetest, and the tremolo reaches the heart most readily. 
There is triumph — even something akin to ultimate joy — in 
our deepest sorrows, nobly felt, and nobly borne. 



15a LIFE AT ITS BEST. 

"Thank God for grace, 
Ye who weep only! If, as some have done, 

Ye grope tear-blinded in a desert place 
And touch but tombs — look up! Those tears will run 

Soon in long rivers down the lifted face 
And leave the vision clear for stars and sun." 

It is this ability to look through life and death, to turn to 
recompense 

"Tears from the depths of some divine despair," 

that proclaims this essence within and its power to recuperate 
and restore itself. For such is the power given to that life 
which has come to its best. 

Is not this eternity sense the soil out of which faith springs ? 
The fact cannot be otherwise. Faith is discovered affinity. 
It is divineness at work in us. It is the convergence of all 
our powers at the point of the highest, and that highest il- 
luminated by the light of the Spirit divine. Now this is the 
victory that overcometh, that brings life to its best — even 
our faith. This is the faith which has 

"Its center everywhere, 
Nor cares to fix itself to forms." 



I 



OCT 8 1908 



IHiiiiniunniUHiiii 

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



029 547 479 8 



